Honest to a fault, richly veined with indelible images: a monumental piece of work.
A founding McSweeney’s editor tells about his privileged and impressively troubled young years, with surprisingly few missteps on a well-worn path.
Wilsey was blessed and cursed with an extraordinarily messy, dramatic, wealthy family that tore him to shreds when they weren’t casting him aside. The story begins in a frantic flurry that the rest of the book—wonderfully lengthy by the standards of this generation, who normally sum things up in 180 or so loosely spaced pages—will wind itself trying to keep up with: “In the beginning we were happy. And we were always excessive. So in the beginning we were happy to excess.” Wilsey’s father was a millionaire many times over, while his mother was a legendary beauty raised by itinerant heartland preachers—the pair of them whirling dervishes of Bay Area society, she hosting salons and he buzzing over Napa Valley in his helicopter. Wilsey was alternately obsessed over and ignored. Already withdrawn by the time his father (after having an affair with Danielle Steele) left his mother for her best friend, a rapacious social X-ray, he, not much later, became a full-blown delinquent. A rich kid cliché, he shuttled between his sniping parents and rambled through an ’80s adolescence stoned and clueless, slumping further into a self-destructive despondency. Meanwhile, his mother dragged him and a retinue of children around the world in a surreal campaign for peace that was more exasperatingly arrogant one-woman theater (camera crews! meeting Gorbachev!) than humanitarian endeavor. Wilsey’s prose can’t hope to maintain its rather astonishing momentum through almost 500 pages, and so some stretches drag, especially those about the creepy program that seems more cult than school but that does manage to straighten the boy out. Only in his later years does the focus of Wilsey’s self-lacerating style soften somewhat—he’s not a writer you want to see mellow—but it’s a small complaint.
Honest to a fault, richly veined with indelible images: a monumental piece of work.Pub Date: May 23, 2005
ISBN: 1-59420-051-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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