This concluding volume has the feel of literary durability about it, even more than the much-ballyhooed Rocket Boys (1998).
Hickam’s third installment in his bestselling memoir (The Coalwood Way, 2000, etc.) about coal country West Virginia is, pleasingly, more leathery than the sentimental earlier material as he attains his college years and must return to Coalwood under difficult circumstances.
Hickam has gone off to Virginia Polytech to pursue his dreams of rocket science but is required to return to Coalwood, his hometown that lived and, unfortunately, breathed coal. It is only for the summer, but Hickman’s none too happy to be back in Coalwood, despite his obvious affection for the place. His father is under a cloud for a deadly mining mishap; his mother has moved down to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in what looks like a potential marital split; and Hickam must take a job in the mines to pay for an auto accident, which means he must join the union, to his parents’ horror. His father pretty much turns him out, but there are bright lines to the story as well: a track-laying contest, a girl named Rita, and the story behind his father’s reticence in talking about the night of the accident that killed his friend. Hickam’s dulcet voice is a soothing counterpoint to the familial and social woes of Coalwood, paternalistic company town or not, and despite the steel bosses and the secrets of the tight-knit town and the brutality of life in the mine—something made very real here by Hickam’s being right down there—the tale unfolds like a bedtime story. That things turn out for the best makes this an appealing capstone. Hickam ends with a short chapter on his life after leaving Coalwood that is way too rushed—how jarring “Pleiku” and “Dak To” sound in this context, or learning that Hickam worked only at the fringes of rocket science.
This concluding volume has the feel of literary durability about it, even more than the much-ballyhooed Rocket Boys (1998).Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-33522-9
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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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