For those who require the full Jobs collection.
Free-wheeling memoir of the author’s relationship with the young Steve Jobs, which led to the birth of their daughter, Lisa.
When artist Brennan writes that “[t]he histories of women involved with so-called great men occupy a shabby territory in the public’s mind,” it is a poor strategy to deflect potential criticism of motives and conduct, for it dodges personal responsibility, something she imparts to Jobs, who swarmed with “misanthropic confusion.” Their on-again, off-again relationship was never smooth, and the author could relate to Jobs’ adoptive mother’s comment: “Steve was so difficult a child that by the time he was two I felt we had made a mistake. I wanted to return him.” Regardless, the author “knew he was a genius when I first saw him because his eyes shone with brilliant, complicated cartwheels of light,” that he “had a big conversation going on inside,” and when he spoke, “[h]e would often say things that seemed to come from the high winds of a vast plain.” In Jobs, she found a seeker who came with a price—“Highs and lows are what it takes to break the mold of previous consciousness and allow world-shattering ideas to be birthed”—but Jobs was psychologically damaged goods, needy of all the attention, and “[h]e’d wipe people out in the process” of getting it. Brennan writes of their taking LSD, Jobs’ Zen teacher and his friendships, and a sweet vignette of days on a communal farm, yet she provides nothing groundbreaking. Jobs was cheap and caustic and tried to drive a stake between mother and daughter—though seemingly worthy criticism bleeds into odd psychological speculation: “I will be clear. Steve was not a sexual predator of children. There was something else going on…my sense is that part of Steve’s fractured emotional development resulted in his ludicrously fetishizing sexuality and romance.”
For those who require the full Jobs collection.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-03876-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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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