A sweet-and-sour account of a family that is unhappy in its own unique—and very amusing—way.
Adolescence meets enlightenment in this funny memoir, which details what happens to an awkward English teenager when his middle-class, middle-aged father decides to go Hindu.
At the start of this droll coming-of-age account, rock critic Hodgkinson (Song Man: A Melodic Adventure, or, My Single-Minded Approach to Songwriting, 2008, etc.) is a Jimi Hendrix–loving 11-year-old who has just moved into a newer, bigger home with his well-paid journalist parents, Nev and Mum, and his surly older brother, Tom. The folks have little in common; Nev is a patient, easygoing, well-respected journalist, while Mum is a loud, brash, well-paid Fleet Street doyenne. It was a rocky but solid environment that was destabilized when Nev became seriously ill—and had a blinding light vision that would lead to permanent family embarrassment. Soon after, he joined the Brahma Kumaris, an ascetic, female-led Hindu cult that proclaims the virtues of meditation, vegetarianism, and celibacy. For Mum, this transformation wasn’t a total disaster; she hated sex and was glad to give it up. For the author, Nev became the source of confused emotions; he loved and defended his dad, and he was also ashamed of him. The situation led to some hilariously described episodes, such as when Nev showed up unannounced at Will’s school, in regulation pajamas, to explain meditation to the class. (It didn’t take long for Will’s classmates to “start sniggering, whispering, and generally making it clear that this was something I would never, ever be allowed to forget.”) With a sharp wit that is never mean-spirited, Hodgkinson recounts his growing up and coming to terms with all the various characters in and out of his family.
A sweet-and-sour account of a family that is unhappy in its own unique—and very amusing—way.Pub Date: June 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-00-751463-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Borough Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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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