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MY FIRST SEVEN YEARS (PLUS A FEW MORE)

A MEMOIR

Pleasingly accessible picture of the faraway childhood that molded a modern artist.

Chronicle of the 1997 Nobel Laureate playwright’s formative years and experiences in his native Italy.

No ponderous discourse on the meaning of life and art from the man (b. 1926) whose body of work includes a TV drama the Catholic Church called the “most blasphemous” ever broadcast to the Italian public. Indeed, Fo’s consistent vein of socialist anti-authoritarian themes even gave the U.S. government pause about granting him a visa to perform here 20 years ago. In his memoir, however, with Farrell’s adept translation, Fo gives glimpse after revealing glimpse of the shy station-master’s son whose imagination, nurtured by caring parents and relatives, and hunger for the aura of the fabulatore—the storyteller—took him far beyond the railroad tracks of his youth. So willing were his parents to enrich his fantasy life, for example, that they encouraged him to believe that all the roof tiles in the Swiss town he could see across Lake Maggiore were made of chocolate. This gentle joke was on him, but Fo realized early on that it was far more fun telling stories when the joke was on the listener, just as his maternal grandfather, Bristìn (a nickname meaning “pepper seed”), would win over customers for his farm produce by needling them as they gathered to buy. But it was the glass-blowers, fishermen and smugglers in the international factory town of Porto Valtravaglia, where his father was reposted, who riveted him with their elaborate stories. After much examination of “the texts of medieval codices and poets,” Fo writes, “I discovered, not without some smug self satisfaction, that . . . in those writings lie the roots of every fable I learned from my story tellers.” The memoir also covers the author’s comic adventures in deserting from the fascist army in wartime by first volunteering for hazardous duty.

Pleasingly accessible picture of the faraway childhood that molded a modern artist.

Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2006

ISBN: 0-312-35917-9

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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