As frivolous as its centerpiece.
Jarvis (The Marriage Sabbatical, 2000) chronicles the adventures of 13 California women who pooled their money to buy a $37,000 diamond necklace.
They named it Jewelia (in honor of Julia Child, who had died two months earlier in 2004) and determined that each of them would have it for 28 days, during her birthday month. Through sharing the necklace, this passionate and diverse group became a charitable and unifying community force as well as a close-knit band of friends. They far outshone their purchase, but the author is so dazzled by the diamonds that she devalues the women who wore them. Rather than examining why a luxury item was necessary to catalyze such nourishing togetherness, Jarvis continually gushes that the necklace is a magical miracle. She bombards us with tales of the transcendent ecstasy the women experienced when donning Jewelia, but she never explores why it inspired such excitement and Buddha-like empathy for others. Although the book is trumpeted as an anti-materialist lesson in the value of collaboration, the author mostly misses what was truly remarkable about the collective: the fact that its founding members looked beyond their usual social circles when recruiting partners, uniting people who seemingly had nothing in common and in several cases alleviating long-standing feelings of loneliness and isolation. Why would diamonds, of all things, inspire this unusual openness? Does modern life have so few vehicles for sisterhood that shopping is the one thing we have left? Jarvis avoids wrestling with such ideas, preferring to fawn and overstate.
As frivolous as its centerpiece.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-345-50071-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 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.
