Jerome reports that memory, routine, and even sleep are among the compensatory pleasures of old age (when even sex can be...
Sagacious and entertaining field notes on a canoe trip into the cold waters of old age.
In this memoir of 12 chapters named by months, consciously patterned after Thoreau, Jerome (Blue Rooms, 1997; The Writing Trade, 1991; etc.) makes good use of his extensive background in advertising, athletics, and magazine writing. On turning 65, the author plans to rent a dumpster for “clearing out the trash of youth . . . as if preparing for a move.” Beyond removing the clutter of younger projects and disposing of the effluvia acquired in the course of a life spent in the media, Jerome needs to space out his time. Movement is slower with the hyper-gravity of “geezerhood,” though Jerome fights to jog and swim despite the bulging disks in his vertebra. After the shock of reaching the age of retirement (“How can we use up a whole tube of toothpaste when we use it in such little dibs and dabs?”), the veteran realizes he’s in for the fight of his life—for the duration. Jerome has wise phrases about aging and mortality as a human process, and wisecracks about discovering his remarkable talent for sitting still. Jerome displays much awareness of the biology of aging—of the muscles, tissues, bones, nerves, and cells of our inexorable entropy. He calls it unfair that so many more of our neurons convey pain than pleasure. He mocks himself as Languid Man, as someone the cyber age has passed by. He jokes about spring being an itchy time even without a brace on his neck, but gamely goes on challenging canoe expeditions.
Jerome reports that memory, routine, and even sleep are among the compensatory pleasures of old age (when even sex can be slow and tender). The insights, courage, and humor of this memoir create a wake that younger paddlers could follow.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50056-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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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