A cleareyed memoir by a writer resolved to claim her “place on the battlefield of feminism.”
Frank, no-nonsense reflections by the French novelist about her gradual road to feminism through World War II, three husbands and the embrace of the writing life.
Describing herself as docile and untalented as a child, Groult became a “timorous teenager” by 1939. She writes that it took the next 20 years for her to awaken the “deep sleep of [her] intelligence” and sexuality. In these warm, outspoken reflections on her coming-of-age and maturity, Groult blames the deep-seated misogyny of the time for her early feelings of insignificance: the patriarchal Catholic schools, the lack of strong female role models, the pressure on young women to find husbands, the lack of meaningful careers and derision generally held for women with education. Like her literary model, Simone de Beauvoir, Groult was bookish and conflicted continually by the tension to achieve as well as be attractive to men. Confined to occupied Paris with her family, she writes unreservedly about French anti-Semitism (“The Jews had their own fate which didn’t concern me”), her brief first marriage to a dying consumptive poet and her sexual enlightenment thanks to a newly liberated Paris full of American soldiers. Her marriage to the dashing journalist Georges de Caunes opened doors as a radio journalist during a frightening time when she had to seek abortions every few months. A new marriage and the women’s movement spurred her breakthrough best-seller Ainsi soit-elle in 1975, inspired by stories of female circumcision. A question-and-answer format with journalist and biographer Josyane Savigneau marks the later chapters.
A cleareyed memoir by a writer resolved to claim her “place on the battlefield of feminism.”Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59051-543-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
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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