In 1988, Corman contributed an essay to the New York Times Magazine on his Bronx neighborhood, which he reprints here....
Corman (The Boyfriend from Hell, 2006, etc.) returns to the place he fictionalized in The Old Neighborhood (1980) in this affectionate recollection of his youth.
In the 1940s and ’50s, the Bronx was a safe, diverse and vibrant community. In short chapters, each just a few pages long, the author reminiscences about playing stickball and basketball, rooting for baseball teams, spending long afternoons at one of the neighborhood’s many movie houses, reading comic books in the local candy store, visiting the zoo, trying to learn to ice skate with a friend who wanted to impress a girl, and going to school. Corman was a middling student, good in English and history, struggling in math and science. He recalls with resentment the heartlessness of a few teachers. Although there is a generic quality to many of his recollections, his family life was far from ordinary: His father had abandoned him, his mother and sister when Corman was 5, and he was told while growing up that he was dead. Much later, his mother confessed the truth—that his father had failed financially, run off in shame and even pleaded with his mother to join him when he landed a job in the South. But she refused, and the couple divorced. Corman and his family lived with his aunt and uncle, who were deaf mutes. With no special interests or talents, the author decided to get a business degree with the goal of working in advertising. When he realized that the advertising industry would not hire a Jew from the Bronx, he turned to business writing and then to writing scripts for an educational film company. With the encouragement of a friend, he also worked on his first novel, Oh God!, which he published in 1971.
In 1988, Corman contributed an essay to the New York Times Magazine on his Bronx neighborhood, which he reprints here. Lively and concise, it contrasts with the bland and fragmented quality of the rest of the memoir.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-56980-518-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Barricade
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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.
