A tortured love letter from son to mother, well worth reading.
In this interview-based memoir with hints of a mystery, a man tries to get to the bottom of his mother’s troubled life.
Debut memoirist Glascoe opens his story at the nursing home where his mother, Maggie, is in the end-of-life stage with Alzheimer’s. He then begins his search of the past in their native Scotland and in Toronto, where Glascoe’s family had immigrated when he was still a child. In Scotland, his father, Bob, worked in the coal mines before and after his traumatic World War II service, while Maggie supported the family with factory defense work. Living close to the bone, it wasn’t a happy marriage, yet it lasted right up until Bob committed suicide and Maggie’s Alzheimer’s began to manifest. But had she been seriously unbalanced long before that? Glascoe gathers recollections from his estranged brother, his nephew, his daughter, his wife and others, probing what they remember and what they feel—anything that could shed light on the life of this passionate, intelligent but stymied and contentious woman. Memories conflict, and many of these people are in denial. Glascoe learns more about the family’s messy dynamics than he ever realized; in fact, it may all be a fool’s errand with no satisfying answers, and he may never truly know his mother and her dark motivations. In an ironic twist, the funeral home misplaces then “finds” her ashes, so Margaret McGregor Glascoe is as elusivea figure in death as she was in life. Aware and witty, Glascoe is a talented writer. The chapters adroitly toggle between his weekly visits with his mother in a Toronto nursing home and his interviews with everyone who might illuminate his search. The nursing home scenes can be rather depressing, and he captures that despair and absurdity perfectly. In an eloquent late chapter that could stand by itself, he reminds readers that Maggie was like most of us: We will never be famous or exceedingly celebrated, but we deserve to be remembered and loved.
A tortured love letter from son to mother, well worth reading.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491854037
Page Count: 192
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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