Single and suffering from the lack of a serious relationship, this 30-something author and TV personality enlisted the pre-feminist advice of the original Cosmo Girl. Her candid memoir details one woman’s search for love in the wired 21st century.
Though happy with her career, David (Bought, 2009, etc.) heard her biological clock ticking loudly and realized her life was devoid of eligible male companionship. After stumbling across a copy of Sex and the Single Girl, a romantic how-to book written in 1962 by Cosmopolitan former editor, Helen Gurley Brown, David embarked on “Gurley-afying” herself: “What if I tried every last suggestion she gave for becoming more feminine and meeting men?” With that approach in mind, the author jumped into redecorating her drab apartment, learning to cook and dressing more attractively. She strove to develop a “richer inner life” and worked on what were the “less-than ideal parts of myself.” In between her self-improvement episodes, David lays bare her life. The author analyzes her family travails, failed relationships and past substance-abuse problems and discusses how this messy combination laid the foundation for her current dearth of male companionship and lackluster personal life. David tried online dating, began cooking meals at home, traveled alone for fun and actually took a pottery class instead of just talking about it. “By pushing myself to follow Helen’s instructions for living,” she writes, “I’ve discovered just how simple it can be to change who I always thought I was.” David captures her escapades and social encounters with a snappy writing style and keen observation of the mating rituals of urban professionals approaching middle age. The author’s shtick is sure to appeal to women who are stymied by a similar situation, while others may find David’s romantic quest a bit tedious at times—but still worth a quick glance.
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-199604-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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
PERSPECTIVES
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