O’Faolain may be “almost there”—free of turbulence and waste, out of the wild hills and onto calm water—but she may also be...
With the same emotional spadework as in her bestselling Are You Somebody? (1998), O’Faolain turns over the past half decade to try understanding how and why they happened.
O’Faolain moves from her 50s to her 60s during these years, and she feels the narrowing of time and prospects. The narrative is broken into shortish segments, as if the charge of her thoughts quickly saps her energy, so hard do they burn. She is childless and alone at the start, having just ended one long-term relationship, though soon enough she launches a rather greedy affair with an older (and, as she’ll later discover, married) workingman (one senses she is tapping him for character material to use in a novel) and then starts a new love affair in America with a man named John. “One of the great things about this time of life,” she says, is “that good things matter to their fullest extent, because you know exactly how rare they are.” This includes, for her, the rekindling of society with her older siblings, friendships, and an alertness to the pleasures of animals and the natural world. But O’Faolain is one to worry the ambiguities and ambivalences in all that touches her life—shrewdly, artfully, without equivocation. There are obvious things: her alcoholic mother, family pain, the regrets of a spent—blown—youth, drinking too much, the disappearance of love, the place of women in Irish culture, the place of Ireland in her heart. And there are things you wish she’d leave well enough alone, like the minor problems with John (and, oh, how readers will pull for that relationship) that she picks at obsessively.
O’Faolain may be “almost there”—free of turbulence and waste, out of the wild hills and onto calm water—but she may also be constitutionally incapable of such a condition: there’s too much grit in her keen eye to let it rest easy upon the world.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2003
ISBN: 1-57322-241-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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