While brilliant enough on what it reveals, this tripartite memoir by a great man of letters nevertheless reserves much of his life from illumination. Kermode grew up between the world wars in Douglas, the chief port on the Isle of Man. Describing his Manx childhood, he expertly conveys the mixture of magic, mystery, and terror proper to literary recollections of one's youth. Memories of faking a report card, of enduring sadistic bullies, even of solemnly inquiring of God whether oranges taste the same to everyone might seem essentially commonplace. Yet Kermode's trenchant style transfigures such experiences, while his vivid depiction of straitlaced yet vibrant Manx culture as it slowly emerged from the Victorian era enhances his memoir's drama. Strong passages frame the enigma of his mother's vague rural origins and the niceties of class distinctions at the dockside warehouse where his father toiled. The next segment of the memoir treats Kermode's service in the British navy during WW II. Here he offers sterling anecdotes that convey the pathos, horror, and absurdities of the times. That the final third of the memoir, covering his 50-odd-year career as a scholar and literary journalist, should include only a few words about his two marriages disappoints. Kermode acknowledges this ellipsis, professing himself a failure as a family man. Such self-deprecation and reserve also characterize his account of his professional life, which Kermode narrates as a series of failures, most prominent among them his tenure at the CIA-supported literary magazine Encounter and a professorship at Cambridge University, both of which ended with him resigning in protest. More might have been said about his successful books and about his experiences teaching in the US. But what Kermode does share remains of great interest: However truncated, the story of his later years will intrigue literary intellectuals, while his lambent memoirs of youth should attract a broad audience.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-18103-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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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