Lively's experience as an English child in Egypt (and briefly, Sudan, Palestine, and exotic en routes) is perceived and pursued through the stubborn opacity of adult memory, longing for ``the rainbow experience we all have lost but of which we occasionally retrieve a brilliant glimpse.'' It is novelist Lively's (Cleopatra's Sister, 1993, etc.) aim to discuss ``the nature of childhood perception and a view of Egypt in the 1930's and 1940's.'' She richly and elegantly succeeds. The child's vision of the world, declares Lively, is anarchistic, focusing on the moment; the child sees an unpredictable world in which anything is possible. The Egyptian landscape (bright green, gray/green, and tawny) held ``endless pilgrimages'' of animals and people, the smell of dust and dung. About the different ways of the natives, the intimate yet somewhat puzzling relationship with servants, Lively writes: ``This was the world. How could it be otherwise?'' To the young Penelope, her parents—career banker father, fashionably idle mother—were ``peripheral''; nanny Lucy was her whole emotional world. Like every child, Penelope was faced with the complex codes of adult society. Certainly English was best, but what about an English friend in the Brownies who shouldn't be invited to tea? (Lively recalls puzzled but quiet acquiescence.) Throughout the tumult of desert wars, Penelope and Lucy struggle to conquer math and history; in Cairo (the pyramids were after all just pyramids), they feed an elephant who accepts peanuts with a trunk ``warm and hairy and deft.'' There's an interesting ``collision'' between recovered perception and received history, however, in a nine-year-old's view of Charles de Gaulle, sponge in hand, on his way to the bath of a Jerusalem hotel. There is such strength in Lively's ``statements'' from the past—the long desert roads, sensuous Khartoum, Alexandria—that when she records the 1945 return to England—''the inconceivable cold, the perpetually leaking sky''—the reader feels the chill. A quite stunning meditation on the archaeology of memory and time's predations—persistent concerns in Lively's recent, superior fiction. (16 pages b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017106-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© 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.
