The discontinuous history of an extended black family from New Orleans, which, for lack of authorial perspectives, amounts to little more than a dreary recital of harsh truths. In 1979, Bates (Writing/Harvard) met the clan's patriarch, Collis Phillips (then 70), at a New Orelans gym where the author had gone to learn boxing. In-your-face realities soon dashed Bates's prizefighting fantasies, but he became intrigued by the personable old trainer who had not discouraged him. Until Phillips died in 1989, Bates took a ringside seat at the Phillips family's rites of passage, learning much of their story. The father of six, Phillips had earned local celebrity as a club fighter during the Depression. While working as a trainer after WW II, though, he lost a leg as the result of a gunshot wound inflicted by an angry daughter—and he had scarcely better luck with his other children. One son committed suicide, and two others (including a middleweight contender) wound up sentenced to long terms in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. By and large, succeeding generations fared badly with either life or the law. Alcoholism, crime, divorce, drug addiction, illiteracy, jail, and menial jobs were the common denominators of their individual fates as fighting arenas, courtrooms, lockups, and public-housing projects circumscribed wasted lives that often ended in early graves. Here, Bates seems to believe that the mass of painful detail he has compiled, apparently at no small personal cost, speaks for itself. The accretion of grim particulars on essentially unsympathetic characters, however, soon becomes mind- numbing and, eventually, meaningless. Nor does it help that the author eschews interpretive commentary, engages in jolting time- shifts, and couples his own self-consciously literary style with intrusive attempts to reproduce the slurred speech of uneducated southern blacks. Although there's a certain interest to the overlong narrative's raw material, without any effort by Bates to shape it, the annals of the Phillips family are little more involving than matter-of-fact police reports.
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-25047-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992
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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