Reads like a mashup of at least three different books in one, written with psychological insight and literary flair but...
A fledgling writer tackles a true-crime story and, in the process, discovers some uncomfortable truths about himself.
As a graduate student in the creative writing program at the University of Iowa, Wood learned of a murder and arson at the Tampa-area motel where he’d recently stayed. There was no body, weapon, or motive, but the woman, Sabine, who co-owned the motel with her estranged husband, had gone missing. Her car was found with somebody else driving it, a man with a shady past. Less than two weeks later, the motel was torched. There were three suspects: Sabine’s estranged husband, her ex-con boyfriend who had done odd jobs at the motel, and the stranger driving her car. Wood felt like he didn’t belong in Iowa and was suffering something of the imposter syndrome as a would-be writer with nothing to write. After his mother sent him a news clipping about the crime, he writes, “I found in this fiery motel everything necessary to write.” The most conventional part of the story follows a familiar true-crime format, culminating in a confession that solves the mystery. But along the way, the book becomes more about Wood and how he stumbled into a relationship with a woman he didn’t know as well as he should have. He finds eerie parallels between this relationship and the one that he imagines developed between the woman who is now missing and likely murdered and her boyfriend, a prime suspect who was returned to prison on a parole violation. As the author began to sense “the creeping entanglement” of the stories, “a sharp nausea crept over me.” The narrative then shifts into Wood’s projected account of exactly what happened, how the romance developed between the ex-con and the woman, and how she died. It’s as much about what he sees in himself as it is about what might have happened to somebody else.
Reads like a mashup of at least three different books in one, written with psychological insight and literary flair but lacking cohesion and focus.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61620-730-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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
PERSPECTIVES
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