As well-researched as it is seamlessly composed, this book entertains as it educates.
A Vanity Fair contributing editor encourages adult readers to tumble back down the rabbit hole of childhood and rediscover their favorite books.
In his first book, veteran cultural critic Handy, a former writer and editor at both Time and Spy magazines, astutely discusses the central truth about rereading children's books, which is that the experience is equal parts nostalgia and revelation. Focusing on books for pre–young adult ages, he observes that adult rereaders of beloved childhood texts cannot engage with the work without acknowledging the mature perspective that adulthood confers; thus, they will rediscover the works from a new vantage point. A book like this is difficult to write and can be even more difficult to find an audience for. To succeed, the tone must be informative but not pedantic, and Handy nails it, displaying a highly engaging prose style that showcases an impressive ebb and flow of sentence structure and delicate mix of information and entertainment. The author expertly employs his experience as an editor and writer, mingling personal anecdotes with literary history and social commentary while discussing the enduring popularity of Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon or pondering what message Shel Silverstein’s somewhat masochistic The Giving Tree is supposed to teach its young audience. Handy’s candor is one of the book’s most refreshing features, and he invites readers to puzzle through their own complicated thoughts about favorite novels right alongside him. Writing about everything from The Chronicles of Narnia to Where the Wild Things Are to The Tale of Peter Rabbit, the author demonstrates a deep love of children’s literature and a keen understanding of the ways in which reapproaching beloved texts can highlight the connections and differences between a child’s perception and adult reality.
As well-researched as it is seamlessly composed, this book entertains as it educates.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4516-0995-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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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