A powerful nod to familial bonding, written with verve and genuine affection.
Emmy Award–winning screenwriter Powers initiates a desperate manhunt for his suicidal gay twin brother, who has vanished seven years after their tumultuous college days.
Alerted by his brother’s colleague, Powers discovers that his brother—they were born five minutes apart, both gay—has mysteriously disappeared. Knowing what he knows about Tim and his emotional issues, Kim suspects his brother has gone on a drinking binge due to anxiety over some changes in his life, including a new apartment. There’s much history between them. After their mother died young (of indeterminate causes), feelings of guilt and confusion surfaced, and both brothers resigned to believing they were the product of a “cursed childhood.” Growing up together, then separating after college, Kim moved in with his lover, a costume designer in Manhattan, and moody brother Tim relocated to Kentucky for a “crashed and burned” lifestyle of heavy drinking, self-mutilation and extravagant letter-writing to his brother before finally moving to New York and getting a job with a middling film director. Upon Tim’s disappearance, Kim notifies their older brother, anxiously questions friends, scours Tim’s apartment, his day-planner and bundles of secret letters, then smartly goes back to his brother’s college research papers, since this latest disappearance coincided with the same time of year as Tim’s emotional breakdown while away at college—the year he’d described as “swimming in time and space.” Picking up clues here and there, Kim follows a “path of bloody breadcrumbs” from a Greenwich Village bar, then sniffing around painful, long-buried memories back at Austin College in Texas, and on to some difficult soul-searching of his own. Powers amplifies his quest with frantic energy and such a desperate sense of urgency that when Tim is finally discovered, their tearful reunion seems anticlimactic at first—but more heartbreak is close behind.
A powerful nod to familial bonding, written with verve and genuine affection.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2006
ISBN: 0-78671-723-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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