The author shows us many small moments, igniting each with sparks of passion, memory and intelligence.
A family death sends a celebrated author back to his boyhood home in Memphis, Tennessee, where many family members and memories await.
Theoretical physicist and novelist Lightman (The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew, 2014, etc.) had left Memphis as a young man, telling us later in this emotional, moving tale that he had vowed never to move back. The reason: the assassination in Memphis of Martin Luther King Jr. Race is a principal character in this unusual, even eccentric, memoir. Although Lightman writes that he invented some characters and lightly fictionalized some episodes, he frankly confronts the ugly racial history of Memphis—and of his own family (they had a black housekeeper). His grandfather and father had owned and managed major movie theaters in the area (the author worked in one as a teen), and Lightman recalls how his father quietly and slowly integrated the venues with very few problems. The author’s organization is a bit like a photo album. There are many short segments beginning in the present tense (which he uses to record his monthlong sojourn at home); he then shifts to the past when something in the present serves as a trapdoor to drop him into the past. Along the way, we meet siblings, quirky aunts and uncles, and cousins. We explore the history of Memphis and some of its notables (including Elvis, whom the author met). About the only Memphis moment of consequence he does not mention is its use as the setting of John Grisham’s The Firm (and the subsequent Tom Cruise film). The cumulative effect of Lightman’s memories is wrenching: Loss and illness and death wander freely in his pages, reminding us of the evanescence of youth and promise.
The author shows us many small moments, igniting each with sparks of passion, memory and intelligence.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0307379399
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
