Another elegant memoir from a talented storyteller.
A memoirist reflects on the lessons of her father, a man with an insatiable lust for life.
“ ‘Travel light,’ my father always said. ‘Move fast,’ ” writes Fuller (Quiet Until the Thaw, 2017, etc.). “He followed that advice, practiced what he preached, like it was a key tenet of his personal religion.” The author’s anecdotal tribute to her late father brims with snippets and snatches of Tim Fuller’s whirlwind lifestyle. The first part of the narrative covers their time in Budapest, where she and her mother watched as Tim, stricken with pneumonia, died in a hospital bed. As the text progresses, Fuller peels back layer after layer of the character of her father, a highly textured world traveler who navigated life using his own compass. Leaving his native Britain behind, he set out to fight in the Rhodesian Bush War. After meeting his true love and having two daughters, they settled in Zambia, where Tim acquired a banana plantation along the Zambezi River. The author ably chronicles this tumultuous transition era, with its constantly changing governments and economic instability. But at its heart, the book is an intimate character study of a spontaneity-loving wild man who, in his younger years, amused himself swerving his car toward the “do-gooder” foreign aid workers and clearing life’s hurdles with a good smoke and a whiskey double. “For him, everything was about time,” she writes, “burning through it the way he did.” Over the decades, the wily expat continued etching his colorful legend into Zambezi Valley lore as the author made off for America, now a traveler in her own right. Tasked to come to terms with his physical absence, she sifted through a lifetime of memories in order to pen this celebration of the man whose profound influence helped shape her own worldview. Fuller writes gracefully about embracing grief as an indelible part of the human experience.
Another elegant memoir from a talented storyteller.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59420-674-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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
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
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