A wise and touching tale about a wealthy cancer victim who offers sage advice.
A dying man sets out to recalibrate the course of his life in this debut novel.
When it comes to astute advice, arguably nobody’s smarter than the suave high schooler Ferris Bueller, the popular movie character played by Matthew Broderick. “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it,” Ferris wisely observes. Indeed, that realization dawns on this story’s narrator, Brendon Merullo, after he receives a cancer diagnosis at age 43. He may have succeeded at building a multibillion-dollar business, but that achievement came at a steep price: no time for the things that really mattered, such as his family—wife Amanda, and children, Thomas and Alexis. Now that he’s staring at an hourglass, watching the grains of sand sliding down, Brendon is haunted by regret. What’s the use of all the material goods he has surrounded himself with if he has no time to enjoy them, he wonders. “I found out that the price tag on the things we buy is not equivalent to their value,” Brendon says. He decides to “right the ship,” to live every minute to its fullest, to follow his heart, and to redirect his waning energy on setting up charities that will have a lasting, positive effect on his community, especially those battling cancer. Brendon makes time to be with Amanda, the kids, and his father, whom he calls a hero. By the tale’s end, he has made peace with his circumstances and learns to let go of regret. The novel’s storyline is pretty skeletal; not much really happens to propel the plot. Instead, most of the book reads like a commencement address directed at graduates, advising them to get their priorities straight before it’s too late. At one point, Brendon muses: “We all lead our lives as if we have an infinite amount of it. You only realize how precious time really is once you are about to run out of it.” But his lament is earnest and sincere, and his realizations about life’s real treasures will resonate with many, especially those facing similar circumstances. After all, Ferris might have been a slacker, but his heart was certainly in the right place.
A wise and touching tale about a wealthy cancer victim who offers sage advice.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-8259-0
Page Count: 218
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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