A sincerely funny debut memoir extolling the benefits of spontaneous escape and personal reflection.
A crestfallen 20-something techie leaves everything behind for a new life on a tropical island.
Sheshunoff’s hybrid of travelogue and anecdotal memoir embodies the dream of giving it all up to escape to paradise. This fantasy of “sitting on a small island and reading all day” was borne from a smoldering combination of a flat-lining romantic relationship and New York City burnout, exacerbated by a frustrating five-year stint at his own struggling, soul-sucking Internet startup business. Abandoning everything related to his former life in technology, Sheshunoff fled to the island of Yap (pop. 6,300, with a “growing leprosy problem”), part of the tropical Caroline Islands of the Western Pacific Ocean, and began living among the region’s indigenous citizens. “I wanted this to be one of those instances when you discover how another culture does something better,” writes the author about the shockingly weighty Yapese stone money, topless native women, and the lenient island dress code. Sheshunoff’s ensuing Micronesian education, presented with great wit and composed through easily digested chapters, is unconventional, goofy, and rife with misadventure. As his idyllic days in the sun progressed, reality seeped in, and the author began to further contemplate his situation. He began to cultivate a romance with Sarah, an American attorney who tempered his tendencies to pontificate while swimming in historic Jellyfish Lake surrounded by a vast universe of jellyfish, “six million friendly cantaloupes in pink tutus…slowly pulsing their way across [the] small, tea-colored lake.” The couple’s eventual decision to build a bungalow together on a different outer island cemented their island fling into a relationship, which included a baby monkey named Gomez. Though the chatty narrative meanders along at a beachcomber’s pace, armchair travelers won’t mind, as the author’s absurdist sense of humor validates the verbosity.
A sincerely funny debut memoir extolling the benefits of spontaneous escape and personal reflection.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-451-47586-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
