How President Jimmy Carter’s late younger brother, Billy, dealt with instant celebrity when the media stereotyped him as a southern “redneck” and “ol” boy” freak, as told by Billy’s son. Buddy writes of his own youth in a hardworking blue-collar family in the small, rural town of Plains, Ga. Billy had matured in the family warehouse business of processing peanut, soybean, and cotton crops, proving himself a successful manager and a serious, dedicated family provider. Billy also enjoyed relaxing with lifelong friends in his “station” (a combined auto-service shop and snack bar). When Jimmy returned home after ten years in the navy, he ran the family business before becoming governor of Georgia and president of the US. Suddenly, reporters, photographers, PR people, cheap souvenir stands, and thousands of tourists intruded on quiet Plains. When the media discovered Billy, who had lost control of his cherished warehouse, having a beer, a legend was born. He was offered unheard-of profitable deals and exploited as an amusing redneck character actor, selling Billy Beer and appearing on endless talk shows. Despite his leap in income, his family was mortified as they saw their beloved, witty father and husband turned into a buffoon. Billy descended into alcoholism and was discarded by his exploiters as he was harassed by the IRS and the FBI, investigating a suspicious deal with Libya. He eventually recovered and tried to rebuild his former life, even though the family business went bankrupt and Jimmy lost his reelection bid. Buddy, author of the novel The Search for Savin” Sam (not reviewed), shows a genuine talent for writing in this poignant, highly emotional profile of a complex man, adored by his family and friends, whose once contented life was changed by a media onslaught and a controlling disease. A touching account by a son who loved his father deeply and skillfully describes how fame and fortune can almost destroy a life.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-56352-553-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Longstreet
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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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