A delightful exploration of childhood fantasy, rudely awakened by reality.
Barlow, the son of a Kansas farmer, escapes into a wonderful world of daydreams in this promising debut memoir.
At age 10, Barlow had little to smile about. Struck down by polio, he spent his time convalescing in a hospital, sharing his hopes and dreams with his young friend, Tim, a fellow patient who later died. The neighborhood kids pushed him around in his wheelchair after he went home—until they grow bored and started to call him names. Woody eventually recovered from polio, only to be diagnosed with a lazy eye that required a complex operation. Confronted by adversity at every turn, the young boy found solace in the landscape surrounding his father’s farm in Olathe, Kan., on the outskirts of Kansas City, Mo. Woody explored back roads on his bicycle and imagined himself as a Wild West gunslinger fighting off Cheyenne Dog Soldiers. At other times, he hung ropes from trees in his yard and became Tarzan, swinging from branch to branch. He pretended that an old woman in town was an evil storybook witch whose powers had to be neutralized, and set about formulating an elaborate plan to bring her to justice. Woody’s daydreams challenged the drudgery of his everyday life, but as he grew older the demands of adulthood bore down on him. He was mystified by women and sex, and strove for some amount of financial independence in the hope of buying a car. His dream world began to dissipate, and, in turn, the memoir loses some of its playful charm; the blunt pain of reality is hammered home when Woody, working a shift at the bowling alley, hears the announcement of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The author delivers his narrative in an affable, laid-back style with a distinctive wry wit. Throughout, the memoir successfully channels and finds catharsis in a land of make-believe often lost to adults. Unfortunately, the book loses its way, or perhaps its heart, in its latter portion when recalling Woody’s unremarkable adolescence.
A delightful exploration of childhood fantasy, rudely awakened by reality.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490952482
Page Count: 340
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2013
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
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