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FIVE MEN WHO BROKE MY HEART

A MEMOIR

Amusing—but lacks genuine self-reflection and depth.

Freelancer Shapiro’s debut memoir catches up with the perps of her top five heartbreaks and rehashes her romantic history.

Approaching 40, the author is suffering the throes of a “ ‘no-book-no-baby’ summer” in New York City. The novel she spent five years writing has been turned down (again), her workaholic husband Aaron is on another business trip, and his lack of sperm motility has thwarted her attempts to get pregnant. Enter ex-boyfriend #1: “Half linebacker, half bespectacled science nerd,” Brad arrives from Boston, his already-sold manuscript in hand. Shapiro pushes aside her resentment (“What the hell did he mean—he had a book coming out. I was the writer!”) and invites him over. In high-heeled “fuck-me slingbacks,” she entertains thoughts of “jumping Brad on the living room floor, getting pregnant, moving to Boston.” Instead, they have lunch. Shapiro steers the conversation to what happened between them years before, conducting the first of her belated exit interviews with former flames. While this conceit was a hit in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, Shapiro’s execution is flimsier. Her light, breezy tone all but assures readers that she won’t be betraying her husband, so her story lacks the tension of something truly being at stake. And she fails to convey a genuine sense of necessity about her quest, whose purpose is diffuse. Although Aaron’s aloofness makes his spouse wonder if she “flunked all five breakups” (she felt abandoned by her exes, feels abandoned by him), and his infertility makes her question whether they’re “flawed as a couple,” it’s not clear how dredging up the detritus of lost loves will shed light. But Shapiro’s story is less enlightening than entertaining. While her candor can give her writing the appearance of real soul-searching, in fact she merely blazes through each encounter, capturing the flirtatious repartee and humor but glossing over the more complicated motivations and emotions.

Amusing—but lacks genuine self-reflection and depth.

Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2003

ISBN: 0-385-33723-X

Page Count: 231

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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