Heartfelt tribute to a kind and wise teacher, though the author seems to have kept the best words of wisdom for himself.
The Anglo-American humorist tells of visits to a wise and understanding spiritual guide. Instead of Morrie on Tuesdays, make it a Catholic ecclesiastic in an English monastery—and tick up the prose a notch.
This inspirational saga starts with Hendra’s 14-year-old hand where it should not have been: under the skirt of cute, friendly, topless Mrs. Bootle. To instruct him in proper hands-off manners, the devout Mr. Bootle hauled him off to the Isle of Wight and the attentions of the Benedictine brothers of Quarr Abbey. (Ah, those Dickensian proper nouns!) There, he came under the aegis of kindly, sweet, and surpassingly understanding Father Joe, who resembled a cartoon monk down to his knobby knees and flat feet—the late Edmund Gwenn could have played Joe to perfection. Thus, young Hendra’s brief excursion beneath a lady’s dirndl led to his epiphany: He would become a teenage monk. Naturally, that didn’t come to pass. Before the author found his true vocation as writer and sometime performer of comedy, he headed for Cambridge and the continent for a proper education. Rather than a monkish tonsure, he encountered Beyond the Fringe. “I went into that theater a monk. I came out a satirist,” he writes. The sporadic visits to Father Joe at Quarr Abbey become less frequent. The story becomes more about Tony than Joe. We learn more about wives and sometime reluctant fatherhood, the career and thoughts of clever Tony than the saintliness of the dear cleric. The writing is certainly quite smart. (One oddity: Hendra eschews capitalization of the Name of the Deity, a convention religiously observed over 20 years ago in the hilarious parody Not the Bible, which he co-authored.) And so the memoir turns into a writer’s autobiography and a showbiz story.
Heartfelt tribute to a kind and wise teacher, though the author seems to have kept the best words of wisdom for himself.Pub Date: May 25, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6184-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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