A fine collection that illustrates the author’s credo that “change, if you embrace it, can be surprisingly rewarding.”
In Resich’s debut essay collection, turning 60 looks pretty good.
The Honolulu-based author wrote this debut collection of essays in 60 weeks, she writes, as a way of “finding” herself following an amicable divorce after 30-plus years of marriage. She draws upon six decades of her life, during which she earned a physics degree, worked for the United Nations and raised her children as a full-time housewife. A self-described “chatterbox,” Resich exalts in positive, lively confidences about retirement, memory loss, parents, children, gratitude and other topics, as she pursues her quest to live life with “confidence and resolve.” However, she’s no Pollyanna: “I’m hard-pressed to find anything graceful about aging,” she writes, but she knows that someday she’ll look back at today’s photos and think, “Boy, did I look good.” Some essays show how her grounded perspective helped her deal with cancers of the breast and tongue (and the resulting surgery, chemotherapy and recovery). Let friends help you, she urges: “I could never have envisioned that six hours of chemotherapy could be a fun (albeit unconventional) social time spent with a close friend.” Her advice? Never ignore something that you feel “isn’t right”; the doctor’s diagnosis that it’s “probably nothing,” she says, could easily turn into “something.” Other essays offer tidbits about her teenage years in Poland after World War II, when fashionable clothes were scarce, food had to be hunted, and kids from rich families were derided as “banana youth.” Overall, she writes with conversational grace in an easy-to-read, gossipy-girlfriend style. Her stories only rarely delve into the world beyond the personal, but this isn’t a serious limitation, as she’s someone readers will want to get to know.
A fine collection that illustrates the author’s credo that “change, if you embrace it, can be surprisingly rewarding.”Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1490430720
Page Count: 166
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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