A moving family history researched with dedication and completed with a granddaughter’s love.
Unearthing her grandparents’ mysterious 50-year estrangement forms the foundation for translator and editor Mouillot’s memoir.
From the time she was a young girl, the author understood that she came from a turbulent family of Holocaust survivors and that her estranged grandparents’ relationship was odd. The family’s emotional terrain consisted of “fights and bitterness, illness and injury, trauma, bad memories, and crazy grudges.” Her mother knew little about their relationship, except for the fact that they hadn’t spoken in almost 40 years. As an adolescent, Mouillot had been close to her grandmother, but it was not until she was 14 that she visited her difficult grandfather alone in Switzerland for the first time. After this visit, the author initially comprehended the volatility surrounding her grandparents’ relationship. The combination of her grandfather’s strong negative feelings for his ex-wife and her grandmother’s vague responses to Mouillot’s inquiries about their relationship prompted more questions. Through convoluted conversations with her mother and grandparents, the author began piecing together the puzzle of their traumatic daily lives. Her grandmother was a physician during the war, and her grandfather served as an interpreter at the Nuremberg trials. After they met, they married, had a baby and moved to a house in the countryside in southern France. Putting together the family story involved many discussions, delving into old family letters and archival research; the process took Mouillot more than 10 years. Before completing the family story, her grandfather lost his memory to dementia, but her grandmother was able to read an early version of the book. “While I was trying to remember,” writes the author, “Grandma was urging me to forget, to put it down on paper and get on with the labor or living.”
A moving family history researched with dedication and completed with a granddaughter’s love.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0804140645
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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