An engaging and cautiously optimistic memoir of making a new life.
A journalist’s account of how and why she took a chance on a new life and home-rehabilitation project in the down-and-out city of Detroit.
When former Fortune Small Business senior editor Haimerl and her husband, Karl, decided to leave their increasingly unaffordable Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook, it was with the idea of going somewhere that, unlike such trendy cities as Portland or Seattle, “was forging its future.” The couple eventually chose Detroit, which appealed because of its “powerful lure of its cheap real estate.” They made their first move away from New York after Haimerl received a prestigious journalism fellowship from the University of Michigan. When a post-graduation job offer at a Detroit newspaper came through, she and her husband took their entire savings and bought an abandoned 1914 Georgian Revival in a revivifying neighborhood. Though listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the house, which the couple bought for just $35,000, was a “3,000-square-foot box of fuckedupedness” that had no electricity, running water, or heat. Friends and longtime Detroit residents urged them to walk away from their investment, but they refused. Armed with an initial remodeling budget of $100,000, they befriended a genially quirky contractor and committed Detroiter who told them that the house would need more than three times that amount to simply become livable. Risking their financial futures on real estate in a city struggling to find its way out of bankruptcy, the pair cast their lot with others like themselves who took Detroit for what it was and didn’t attempt to “make it over into what they left.” Haimerl does not ignore how her place in the middle class made homeownership possible for her, nor does she forget the problematic nature of Detroit's recovery. At the same time, she also concludes that the “key to the city's future” is investment by people and banks willing to believe in Detroit's value as a place to call home.
An engaging and cautiously optimistic memoir of making a new life.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7624-5735-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Running Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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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