The memoir stalls in spots, but Parker is a likable, sympathetic narrator.
This short memoir tracks the author’s lifelong trek from Australia to England to New Zealand and back home.
Debut memoirist Parker’s granddaughter asked for an account of her great-grandfather’s life (which is included as a short addendum to this book). But her request sparked Parker’s urge to recount his own. Born in 1925 in the small Australian town of Carcoar, New South Wales, he went on to at least three careers as a navy man, a merchant seaman, and a teacher. He was a mediocre student but an avid athlete who didn’t get a high school degree until late in life and then went on to university. Early on, the family—father was a World War I vet and a traveling “picture-show man”—moved to Sydney, so young Parker became an urban kid with roots in the country. We learn about his friends and casual enemies (fistfighting seems to have been a popular pastime) and of all the sports that he reveled in. We follow him over the years to England and New Zealand and back home to Ianthe, the girl he finally married. The last chapters are the saddest but the best. Ianthe suffered from dementia and he couldn’t care for Ianthe at home. He felt guilty for having larked about while she raised the kids and kept the home going (one wants to say, “Please don’t beat up on yourself so!”). After a health scare, his desperate and humorous attempt to have chickens for a bit of company ended badly. But in his facing old age and loneliness head-on, we do come to really like this fellow. It’s the best part of the book. Fuzzy black-and-whites from family albums add charm. The anecdotes often fall flat, and the punctuation is very strange, often not just distracting but genuinely confusing.
The memoir stalls in spots, but Parker is a likable, sympathetic narrator.Pub Date: July 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-50-350276-5
Page Count: 136
Publisher: XlibrisAU
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
