An engaging, occasionally frustrating, but generally very satisfying notebook, filled with acutely observed moments both...
A quirky, offbeat memoir-cum-journal from a leading Polish poet.
Although he modestly disclaims any major role in the Polish opposition of the 1970s and after, Zagajewski (Two Cities, 1995) is an important literary figure who was vocally dissident in the era of the great resistance to Communism in Poland. Here, he reflects back on those days and earlier with a mixture of dry-eyed nostalgia and wry-tongued wit. The author has no problem whatsoever in poking fun at the pretensions of a group of achingly, embarrassingly sincere 20-somethings—never hesitating to include himself among his targets. But the spirit of this book is generous to a fault, particularly in its evocation of the battered and weary faculty members whom he encountered during his college days in Krakow. What makes this volume unusual is its formal structure. Zagajewski alternates between reminiscences of the 1960s and ’70s in Krakow, prose poems about his current life in Paris (and Houston, although the Texas city is almost never evoked), and notebook and journal jottings on a wide range of topics, chiefly music and poetry. Holding this potpourri together are certain thematic threads: writers who opine in "defense of poetry" and what that entails; the variegated effects of music on troubled minds; the vagaries of memory; and the life of cities. As he admits early in the book, "I can only try to reclaim a few moments, a few places and events; a few people I liked and admired, and a few that I despised." The result is a series of elliptical, sometimes cryptic anecdotes, recollections, image flashes, and miniatures.
An engaging, occasionally frustrating, but generally very satisfying notebook, filled with acutely observed moments both past and present.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-17652-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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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