A “collaboration” between historian White (Univ. of Washington) and his mother, Sara, this blends formal historical research and the oral tradition. The bare bones of White’s narrative follow the family’s travails via the stories Sara and others remember being told as children, plus those they’ve lived through and generated themselves. Oral recollections, though, often fail to jive among the tellers, much less with the historical record. Therein lies the richness of this somewhat sluggishly told saga. Family members don’t even agree as to why Sara Walsh left Countty Kerrey, Ireland, in 1936 at the age of 16 to join her father and other relatives on Chicago’s South Side. She claims that she didn’t want to leave, though she hated the work on the family’s small farm, as well as working as a kind of indentured servant since the age of 11. Her father, a streetcar repairman in Chicago, had left Ireland years earlier for vague reasons of his own. Sara’s story of the train ride from New York to Chicago is a classic. With nothing to eat or drink and with no idea how to use the bathroom, she was “more absorbed in her hungers and discomforts than in America unfolding past the windows.” Things were strained for the extended family living on South Mozart Street. During the war Sara worked at Chicago Municipal Airport. On a junket to New Orleans she met her future husband, Harry White, a cum laude graduate of Harvard. Their marriage led to bitter clashes between her Irish Catholic relatives and his Jewish family. White hints that his bad memories of his father and his maternal grandmother’s refusal to speak ill of him was “the cruelest work in the book,” but he lets it go: “She insists on her memory.” A story so typical in so many ways profits from White’s personal conflict over the desire to trust familial recollection and the historian’s insistence on fact. (4 b&w photos; 2 maps)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8090-8071-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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