An intriguing premise marred by an uneven delivery.
Freelance reporter Badkhen attempts to wrap her many war-zone experiences around the framework of food.
Born in the Soviet Union, the author has traveled to numerous combat zones, braving the shooting, shelling, highway robbery and inebriated officers to get her stories. Amid the chaos, fear, disease and privation, the author managed to have some fine, though not necessarily lavish, meals with people she came to call friends—examples of “the myriad brazen, congenial, persistent ways in which life in the most forlorn and violent places on earth shamelessly reasserts itself.” In this debut memoir, the author recounts these meals and the circumstances surrounding them. Borsch in Russia, lamb kebab in Afghanistan, dolma in Iraq—these meals seemed to shape Badkhen’s experiences just as much as the horror and destruction of the areas she visited. Though the author provides some cultural insights, the food connection is tenuous, as the meals she discusses feel like asides or afterthoughts to the experiences and the people involved. The chapter on borsch, for example, focuses almost entirely on the Russian government’s response to Chechen rebel activities, mentioning borsch as one constant in the lives of a people continually betrayed by their government. The philosophical connection is interesting, but the food tie-in is more of a random analogy spread across a more compelling discussion about how Russia treats its people. This recurs throughout the book, resulting in a narrative sprinkled with absorbing observations but ultimately made less cohesive by its primary theme.
An intriguing premise marred by an uneven delivery.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6648-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
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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