Dysfunctional family, the mystique of colonial Africa, grief over a dead relative: This debut has a lot going for it, but...
Fans of Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight will enjoy this memoir of growing up in Rhodesia.
“Lauren, my youngest sister, was killed in a car accident on a straight and lonely road in Zambia in 1999.” After that opening line—whose adequate, but not especially lovely prose is representative of the rest of the book—Kann looks back to her childhood. Her mother was a “versatile, complicated drunk,” her father died in an accident that local gossips described as a suicide, and her stepmother, trying to bring up five children on little money, was both strong and needy, beautiful and manipulative. Kann managed to escape after falling in love with a gentle, sensitive American, Mickey, whom she followed to Manhattan and soon married. The couple eventually made their way to a suburban dreamland: three kids, sprawling house in Westport, Conn., pool men, gardeners. Kann filled her days with PTA meetings and carpool and “social obligations.” She kept up with her two sisters, who both lived in Africa. Kann was especially concerned about Lauren, whose husband was charming but emotionally abusive. Lauren whispered about her unhappiness whenever her sister phoned; the only bright spot in her life was her new baby, Luke. After Lauren’s fatal car crash, Kann rushed to Africa, spending many weeks caring for her young nephew. And then . . . well, not much, which is this memoir’s weakness. Kann has set us up for great emotional catharsis, for reckoning with one’s homeland, for confronting inner demons. What we get, instead, is a canned description of sorting through Lauren’s clothes, and a saccharine conversation on the trampoline with nephew Luke: “It’s hard for me to explain exactly how . . . special your mummy was. . . . She loved you so very much.”
Dysfunctional family, the mystique of colonial Africa, grief over a dead relative: This debut has a lot going for it, but never fully delivers.Pub Date: May 8, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-7956-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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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