At times (especially after the not-terribly-startling revelation of Ty’s affair with his adoring, married art student)...
A memoir of hard-won personal development and marital dissolution, set against the transformations of the baby-boomer era, by psychotherapist Pearlman (Keep the Home Fires Burning, not reviewed).
The author begins with ominous evocations of her upbringing in a precariously prosperous, urban Jewish household dominated by the figure of her father—a driven businessman, stern but devoted to his children, whom she gradually realized was a serial philanderer. When he died of heart failure at 46, Pearlman was confronted with the uneasy ambiguities presented by his longtime mistress’s grief, her mother’s evident equanimity, and the revelations of her beloved grandfather’s infidelity as well. Determined to break this familial pattern, and influenced by the early 1960s aura of social transformation, Pearlman fell in love with and married “Ty,” an African-American football player and artist who seemed to epitomize the turbulent dreams of the era. The author depicts her metamorphosis (from reserved, sheltered Jewish girl to politicized, sexually aware young woman) as part of the great urban and social transformations of the 1950s and ’60s. For two decades, Pearlman and Ty enjoyed a sexually charged, progressive marriage, where they both worked and shared child-raising responsibilities; she even published a book on long-term sexual monogamy. Yet this domestic idyll slowly declined as Ty succumbed to temptation. Eventually Pearlman and Ty separate, unable to reconcile separate desires, and the epilogue shows the author cultivating a new relationship.
At times (especially after the not-terribly-startling revelation of Ty’s affair with his adoring, married art student) Pearlman’s memoir becomes repetitive and predictable, but she has a sharp eye for detail and is adept at expanding her discussion of infidelity’s pain and relationship-mutating qualities—pinpointing its effects on children, adult acquaintances, and even (in the case of her parents and grandparents) one’s history.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2000
ISBN: 0-9673701-2-4
Page Count: 248
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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