Published at almost the same time as A Scott Berg’s materful biography of Lindbergh, a sweetly moving memoir of growing up as the daughter of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The novelist (The Names of the Mountains, 1992, etc.) is the youngest of five Lindbergh children, all born after the tragic kidnapping of the famous couple’s first-born son. Few knew the Lindberghs had such a large family, and that was how the family wanted to keep it. To escape publicity, they moved frequently, finally settling in an old stone house in Connecticut, where Reeve grew up after WWII. Her father traveled habitually, consulting for government and industry, but was a devoted—if domineering—parent when home, exercising “affection and discipline in equal measure, often at the same time.” Her mother was a quieter, less controlling presence; she wished to “heal, soothe, and uplift us.” Although Reeve learned little of her kidnapped brother, eventually she too lost a son when he was not yet two years old. Her mother sat with her by the little boy’s body, and together they mourned the lost babies. After Charles Lindbergh died nearly 25 years ago, Reeve sought him out again in his boyhood home in Little Falls, Minn., now a state park site. She reflected there on how to reconcile public and private images of famous parents, as well as on the man who taught his children that intolerance was “repellent and unspeakable”—yet who himself wrote and uttered anti-Semitic statements. Anne Lindbergh, now in her 90s, suffering from the aftereffects of stroke, often doesn’t recognize her daughter. Reeve writes about her mother’s illness with sorrow, anger, humor, and acceptance. She also remembers her grandmothers, her siblings—especially her sister, who died of cancer five years ago—and pleasant summers in Maine. An eloquent recollection of a happy childhood in a tightly knit family whose parents’ celebrity complicated but did not contort their lives.
Pub Date: Oct. 2, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-80770-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
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
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