An intriguing but incomplete outsider’s tale of lethal ambition.
The trials of a young woman interning on Wall Street.
Godiwalla reveals what initially drove her from the suburbs of Houston to seek her fortune in one of the most high-stress, male-dominated work environments on the planet. The third child in a family of exceptionally bright, hardworking daughters, Godiwalla was raised by her first-generation Persian-Indian parents with the expectation that she would excel in school. Wishing to distinguish herself from her sisters, the author looked to Wall Street as the sole means to earning her father’s respect: “I became fixated on the idea that money would not only allow me to live by my own rules but also, down the road, win the love of my father, who was still in awe of the American dream—wealth and prestige.” And so the straight-A student set off for Wall Street, becoming the sole freshman from the University of Texas to undertake a summer internship at JP Morgan, where she quickly learned to lose “anything Southern or middle class.” Undaunted by the exclusive world of finance, Godiwalla returned to New York City the summer of her junior year to participate in Morgan Stanley’s highly selective Scholars program for minorities, which gave her access to the ultra-elite, high-powered world of Corporate Finance along with a six-figure salary to help pay off her student loans. It was here that the author found the horrifyingly sexist and classist environment untenably soul numbing. As with many tales of personal reformation, the real story—how Godiwalla walked away from Wall Street and eventually achieved her other dream of getting married—remains unexplored and is only hinted at in the end papers.
An intriguing but incomplete outsider’s tale of lethal ambition.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-934633-95-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atlas & Co.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
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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