Survivors and fans of the era will find this to be a pleasing book of meaningful touchstones, from beer jingles to Porky’s,...
Building on Sting-Ray Afternoons (2017), Sports Illustrated writer Rushin continues his account of growing up in the 1980s heartland.
“To be in high school in the 1980s is to see yourself depicted in countless movies,” writes Rushin, enumerating such now-classic films as Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Breakfast Club before closing the thought: “confirming your place at the center of the culture.” Sure enough: If the 1950s saw the birth of the teenager as concept and construct, the ’80s saw its apotheosis. Rushin, with a light touch of the bittersweet, recounts that he wasn’t quite the teenager of those films or of celebratory songs by the likes of the Stray Cats and Heaven 17. Instead, he writes, on the brink of adulthood, he was engrossed in books, jazz, and sports, longing not for a muscle car but for a muscle typewriter, an IBM Selectric II, “all that power in your right pinkie.” The author faced most of the usual disappointments but also a couple of unusual victories, including praise from a tough-minded feature-writing teacher who sported “a wardrobe of shirts and ties evidently acquired on the newsroom set of All the President’s Men” and, eventually, publication in Sports Illustrated, his home ever since. Rushin’s account of a sibling-crowded, busy youth in suburban Minneapolis is affectionate and often funny. For example, he writes about resisting his parents’ call to move out via the siren call of newly born cable TV, which urged instead that he lash himself to the basement and stay put, and of the other blandishments of junk culture, including processed-food sandwiches “tasting of salt and moist paper towel." Though without the gritty depth of Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City, situated a few years later, Rushin’s account captures many slices of life in a time fast receding into the depths of nostalgia.
Survivors and fans of the era will find this to be a pleasing book of meaningful touchstones, from beer jingles to Porky’s, love, and baseball.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-41943-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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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