Slapdash and unilluminating.
Psychoanalyst Strozier (History/John Jay College of Criminal Justice; Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, 2001, etc.) assembles a scattershot account of 9/11 and its social significance, the release of which is timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the attacks.
The book draws on interviews with those who witnessed the events of 9/11 firsthand, the author's own account of these events and reported statistics about the physical destruction and environmental damage wrought by the disaster. Many books have been written about 9/11, and many have incorporated the accounts of eyewitnesses. Strozier's book theoretically provides the added benefit of an experienced psychoanalyst's interpretation and analysis of such accounts. Unfortunately, the author's conclusions are generally less valuable and insightful than they are obvious—9/11 tapped into people's fears of apocalyptic nuclear disaster; 9/11 was more traumatic for New Yorkers than it was for Iowans—or irrelevant (Strozier lengthily chronicles his feelings about his son's stalled career as a chef). Further, the prose is jargon-heavy and often feels forced—e.g., “My discussion of the traumatic meanings of 9/11 in this context of the zones of sadness does not try formally to locate my analysis in the academic or psychoanalytic literature on trauma.” Strozier watched the events of 9/11 unfold from the relative safety of Greenwich Village, and he did not lose anyone with whom he was close. Despite his repeatedly asserted desire to show sensitivity toward those who suffered more than he, readers may find it difficult not to find his book self-indulgent.
Slapdash and unilluminating.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-231-15898-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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