Candid revelations that fail to inspire much empathy.
Five women face emptiness and stress after they leave college.
Kitchener graduated from Princeton in 2014 with no clear plans for her future. In her literary debut, she reflects on the first lonely and disorienting year after college based on her own experiences and those of four female classmates. Two are daughters of hugely wealthy parents; one has an extended family in Cameroon; one has been disowned by her father, a Southern Baptist minister, because she is gay; and Kitchener was raised in a Connecticut suburb. Although she is aiming at diversity, the women are privileged simply by virtue of their Ivy League degrees, and it is that privilege, and the oppressive, competitive “Princeton ladder mentality,” that comes across strongly as Kitchener follows their lives from commencement to their first class reunion. All felt driven to climb ever higher on the ladder of success, and all felt wrenched from their community of peers and from the professors who praised and guided them. Suddenly, needing to make their own decisions, they felt woefully unprepared. “No one talks about the isolation, the identity crisis, or the all-consuming panic that sets in when you realize you have no idea what you want to do with the rest of your life and no one around to point you in the right direction,” writes the author, who admits that her book “won’t resonate with everyone,” such as graduates who need to support themselves and those who are unconcerned about how classmates will judge their life choices. When one woman decided to go to medical school at Emory, she was desperately afraid Princetonians would criticize her “for not going to a more well-known school.” Eventually, Kitchener sought psychological help. One woman found community in a church; another, who earned money by dating sugar daddies, tried psychedelic drugs. Love relationships for each were fraught, and Kitchener returns repeatedly to several women’s attraction to polyamory: a primary lover along with less serious sexual relationships.
Candid revelations that fail to inspire much empathy.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-242949-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
