Not enough evidence of life here to warrant CPR.
A memoir from magazine writer Rose that tells us more about who she knows than who she is—and not much in either case.
The author comes out brandishing a knife and looking for trouble in her scant introduction: “People can come into my room if I invite them, but if they don’t like it they can get out fast, because it’s my room.” But as Rose begins her story, her prose goes lugubrious, and “get out fast” seems less like a challenge than a defense mechanism. The memoir maunders along in semi-torpor, detached and depressed as it describes a series of futility wars with hazy, sleep-in protectiveness, perhaps developed in response to her father’s cruel snideness. Rose does some modeling, takes acting classes, cobbles together some friends, all of whom in their 20s display a world-weariness that suggests the next move can only be into a bottle of Seconal. She drops names—always friends of friends or family, never hers—but Robert Hofstadter, John Reed, Tennessee Williams as portrayed here have no more resonance than photographs torn from magazines. When Rose scores a job at the New Yorker, she manages to perk up and wilt at the same time: for once she’s alert to her surroundings, but they give her the swoons, especially when filled with her gods: “Harold Brodkey, George Trow, and three whom I’ve come to think of as Europe, Personality Plus, and Mr. Normalcy . . . all of them were deeply engaged and seriously attracted”—wives notwithstanding. (Rose can’t be bothered with spouses either: “It can be a form of actual day-to-day torture to pretend not to notice the little dishes of poison married people offer you. . . .”) What follows is a compendious, enervating catalogue of snappy responses and witticisms between her and the men, in and out of office and restaurants and bed.
Not enough evidence of life here to warrant CPR.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4124-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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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