As much a profile of the author as of Attila, and likely to appeal more to Vanity Fair readers than the Car and Driver crowd.
A Manhattan socialite’s effusive account of the weirdly symbiotic relationship that developed between herself and a Turkish driving instructor with a penchant for platitudes and a diversified employment background.
When Fine, who writes on fashion, art, and design for Vanity Fair, began taking driving lessons with Attila, dubbed by her the God of Driving, a book editor friend urged her to take notes and keep a diary. The present work is the result. With Attila, who teaches personal growth as well as driving, she learns not just how to handle a car, but how to handle herself. Under his guidance, she finds her patience, peace of mind, and consideration increasing and her physical health improving. Under her guidance, he learns to speak better English. After months of car-driving lessons, Attila introduces her to motorcycles. For her first bike lesson, Fine reports: “I selected black leather pants with ruffles down the legs, a tiny silver Geoffrey Beene T-shirt, and some old black boots from Manolo Blahnik.” Details such as this pervade Fine’s breezy reporting. To drive a sports car she rents for them at $700 a day, Attila wears “immaculate white linen pants, a short-sleeved plaid aqua shirt, slickly polished loafers, and no socks,” while she is clad in “a short navy blue cap-sleeved Beene shirt that unzipped down the front like a scuba suit and blue-and-white Monolo mules.” Even the brand of her body cream is recorded. When the motorcycle they purchase jointly is stolen from Attila before she ever rides it, their relationship stumbles briefly, but matters pick up again when they attend a three-day driving school in Connecticut, where Attila learns racing and she practices accident avoidance. Two weeks later she invites him to join her at the Maybach First Drive, a Mercedes publicity event in Hamburg, Germany. By the happy ending, Fine is driving with confidence and pleasure, and Attila, with her help, is about to open his own driving school.
As much a profile of the author as of Attila, and likely to appeal more to Vanity Fair readers than the Car and Driver crowd.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4421-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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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