A large step for the writer that reads like a smaller accomplishment.
A middle-age rite-of-passage memoir by a writing teacher and published poet.
A father of one with a second on the way, Console (Creative Writing/Kansas City Art Institute; The Odicy, 2011, etc.) seems still to be struggling with the issues he faced as an undergraduate, when he had “the sense of living for alcohol.” He has been sober for more than a decade, though it took him longer to give up marijuana. He misses both but mainly the second. “Maybe I quit using drugs for nothing, I think,” he writes. “It’s not like I have ever lost anything important because of my habits. I am not a real addict in that sense, not unless I am in some kind of denial.” This travel journal details a journey to his wife’s home country of Romania, where neither her marriage (her second) nor their daughter has received official sanction. Before departing, they learned that the fetus she was carrying could have Down syndrome. By the time they returned, a later-term abortion was illegal, though Console was daunted by the idea of raising a child with such special needs. At least that’s what he thought at the outset, when he was determined to refer to it as a “fetus” rather than a baby (and later a baby with a name). As he pondered the morality of his decision (as well as returning to eating meat after years as a vegetarian), he worried mostly about his failure to achieve his potential to write something of significance. “Yet I postpone the decision to begin,” he writes. “I must begin, I must begin to begin.” By the end of this slim volume, its paragraphs jumping back and forth in time and often having only tenuous connections to each other, Console has faced some tough decisions, attained a maturity he was lacking at the start, and has written something.
A large step for the writer that reads like a smaller accomplishment.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-86547-830-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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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