Mildly alluring in the racy passages, but overall, an emotionally detached and disjointed effort.
The self-indulgent navel-gazing of a high-priced call girl.
A few years ago, a notorious London working girl started publishing her journal on the Internet. Through her blog, the anonymous author gained a following in the U.K., and now her work is being brought to the U.S. Each of the 12 chapters (titled in French, for no apparent reason) represents a month in her life. Many pages are devoted to specific customer requests; one can learn a great deal about anal sex here. Rather than being titillating, the author exposes the sex trade for what it is—a commodity. This isn’t a feminist diatribe; the author goes through her assignments with no obvious feelings of degradation. Her apparent motivation is to earn enough cash to support her expensive lingerie habit. The author does have an affinity for rough sex in her personal life, which is—as expected—in shambles. Men come and go in a series of one-night stands and short-lived relationships. She collects old boyfriends like trophies and parades them out in public when she needs to feel desirable. Don’t expect any deep revelations or a grand climax. Other than the sexy bits, the author’s reflections are mundane and include inane observations and shopping lists. The author waxes poetic about a trip to Spain and mentions many of her everyday jaunts about London. In both instances, she painstakingly attempts to capture her settings, but to what purpose is unclear. Is she trying to impress the reader with her intellect? If so, perhaps she should seek out alternatives to her diet of pub-crawling and bed-hopping.
Mildly alluring in the racy passages, but overall, an emotionally detached and disjointed effort.Pub Date: July 11, 2006
ISBN: 0-446-57725-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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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