Aciman (French Literature/Princeton) delivers a clear- eyed eulogy of a lost past and a family in decline. Aciman's Jewish-Turkish-Italian family came to Alexandria, Egypt, in 1905, long before young AndrÇ was born. There they lived in highly leveraged splendor as Aciman's great-aunts and -uncles—particularly Great-uncle Vili, the flamboyant youngest brother—made and lost fortunes, despised the Arab natives, and survived two world wars. The family rose to, and fell from, the heights of government and European-Egyptian society, and by the late 1960s the entire clan had either died, emigrated, or been expelled from their adoptive home. Aciman begins his memoir in the recent past, with a visit to Great-uncle Vili, the first of the family to emigrate. The octogenarian had achieved his goal of becoming a genteel—and gentile— Englishman: Because of his service to the British during WW II—all the while remaining faithful to Italian Fascism—he was granted a country estate in Surrey, where he lived out his life as Dr. H.M. Spingarn. Vili's sister Esther, Aciman's grandmother and one of the last to leave Egypt, was a mazmazelle, a European grande dame who dined at Alexandria's Sporting Club, fingered produce in the market, and bargained mercilessly with the local merchants. She also smuggled money out of Egypt for years before she was expelled along with her sister Elsa and Aciman and his parents. Aciman creates a romantic portrait of a bygone time without idealizing his colorful ancestors. Much of their interest is, in fact, in their pettiness, spitefulness, and bigotry. They were simultaneously assimilated, anti-Semitic, and practicing Jews; masters of their Egyptian servants and ``Dogs of the Arabs.'' Aciman's father was an unrepentant philanderer, his deaf mother a source of shame. He himself appears mainly as observer of the group's deterioration. A skillful portrayal of an extraordinary clan.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-22833-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
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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