There are two wrecks in this strikingly candid memoir, and one reads with the fascination and horror of drivers rubbernecking on a highway. The first wreck is the car crash that lands the author’s parents in the hospital, her mother with 80 broken bones, her father in a coma. The second wreck is Shapiro’s own life—a life that for much of the book makes it hard to sympathize with her. At the age of 23, in the mid- 1980s, she is a cocaine-snorting, liquor-swilling, aspiring-actress babe and the mistress of her former best friend’s stepfather. Having dropped out of college, this product of an Orthodox Jewish home is kept in style by a boorish hotshot lawyer. He buys her furs, jewels, and sports cars, and she numbs her scorn for both him and herself with drugs and alcohol. One feels equal parts pity and revulsion that such an intelligent, beautiful young woman can live such a vapid and amoral life. Shapiro’s saving grace is that she is equally repulsed in retrospect, making no excuses for her bad behavior. And, with her parent’s horrific accident as a wake-up call, as Shapiro gains respect for herself, the reader gains respect for her, as well. The portrait of her family, and of her mother in particular, is as unsparing as her self-portrait—no airbrushing hides the ugliness of the anger that drives her mother: ’she is incandescent, lit from within by a rage she has carried all her life, and which, at the moment of the crash, became her life source.— It will force Shapiro to become estranged from her father’s family at the time she needs them most. Novelist Shapiro (Picturing the Wreck, 1996, etc.) too often settles for clichÇs when she is capable of evocative and original prose, but her story accumulates emotional power as a lost young woman finds her way back to normalcy and a sense of purpose.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-45631-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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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