Sure to be a hit with romantically challenged readers, though neither as clever nor comical as, the fictional Bridget saga...
New York Post columnist Harrison works over her love life in a predictable memoir.
Moving from London to New York to take a newspaper job, the British singleton had trouble getting the hang of hardcore reporting. Asking people to spill their guts about, say, the recent murder of their uncle felt uncouth and invasive. Luckily, Harrison fell into writing a column about her desperate attempts to meet a man in Manhattan, where women between 20 and 49 outnumber their male contemporaries by about half a million. She went on blind dates and speed dates. She wrestled with the question of how often to call a guy she liked, whether or not to snog in the first five minutes of a date and whether Banana Republic’s stretchy couture was “subtle-yet-sexy” or “way too tacky for a first date.” Meanwhile, she was carrying a torch for her boss, Jack. Lo and behold, it turned out he was pining for her too, and the lovebirds finally got together. A serious relationship has just as much drama as a bunch of bad blind dates, Harrison demonstrates; after all, she was ensnared in an office romance, and her job was to chronicle her romantic adventures in the newspaper edited by her new honey. Things with Jack eventually fizzled, of course. Next came a wealthy banker, but he thought she took him for granted and ultimately gave her the boot. Harrison throws in the requisite, if uninspired, chapter on 9/11, and the familiar props of chick-lit are here in spades: endless hand-wringing about being too old to snag a guy or conceive a child, references to Manolo Blahniks and Sarah Jessica Parker, plus enough alcohol to float a small yacht.
Sure to be a hit with romantically challenged readers, though neither as clever nor comical as, the fictional Bridget saga that doubtless inspired it.Pub Date: June 30, 2006
ISBN: 0-7382-1044-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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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