Veers confusingly from the predictable to the deliberately outrageous.
English society as dissected by a young French writer based in London.
Poirier expands on the Frenchwoman’s-eye-view premise of her regular column for the Guardian, getting off to an interesting start by criticizing the vapid politics of British and French teenagers: “today’s protest has turned into another capitalist enterprise.” However, subsequent musings prove to be much less thought provoking, with the author quickly descending into all-too-predictable tracts about Britain’s relationship with America, the English propensity for apologizing, the failings of the English film industry and the difference between English and French sexual proclivities. A few passages offer a soupçon of original thought—Poirier finds the English obsession with pets unusual and lays into animal-rights activism—but it’s often difficult to figure out whether she’s trying to raise a serious point or simply being “overtly French and provocative.” Addressing the common accusation that the French are too serious, she writes, “seriousness is not boring; it is existential.” Is this intended as humor, provocation or a simple statement of opinion? Poirier’s prose doesn’t really convey which of these applies. Readers may guess it’s the author’s actual belief, since the overriding emotion expressed here is love for her homeland. In the author’s estimation, France can barely put a foot wrong, and she lavishes praise on some very esoteric aspects of her native culture; at one point, she declares her preference for the rudeness of Gallic shopkeepers over the polite service she receives the U.K. Though she asserts that this text was written “in the English language, for an English readership,” it may well prove baffling to non-French eyes.
Veers confusingly from the predictable to the deliberately outrageous.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-297-85234-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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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