Tedious and ultimately mediocre.
A nice Jewish boy reflects on his experiences with depression.
Evans initially positions himself as a 30-something descendant of the Borscht Belt. “I knew precisely what my future held,” he writes. “I would be a rabbi. I would be a learned Torah scholar who... would marry a Jewish woman (presumably one with a hairy mole on her face).” This approach provokes mild chuckles but little more. Growing up in the white-bread California suburb of Simi Valley, the author began wrestling with therapy during adolescence, due to “an epic battle of wills” with his overbearing parents. “My first therapist's name was Neil Diamond,” he writes, “but he didn't wear sequins, didn't bring me flowers, and most certainly did not turn on my heartlight.” Evans remained dismissive of the therapeutic process in his 20s, and focused on the accidental good fortune of a “hot blonde” wife and cushy job in advertising. In 2001, he was laid off abruptly, days before the 9/11 attacks. This juxtaposition of personal stress and national tragedy provoked the onset of more serious depression. By the standards of contemporary memoir, Evans’s “bottom” is less than impressive. He obsessed over porn, drank a lot and tried multiple antidepressants that interfered with his sexual functions—all of which seem like fairly universal rites of passage for white-collar men today. Over time, his experiences as a father and with his long-suffering wife began to improve, while his return to therapy (with a practitioner superior to “Neil Diamond”) allowed him to unpack his confused resentment over his upbringing, especially regarding the unique tribalism of American Jews. Unfortunately, the tone is overwhelmingly muddled and repetitive, and the narrative is riddled with the standard blog-influenced tactics of digression and incessant pop-culture references—as well as unpleasant flashes of juvenile misogyny.
Tedious and ultimately mediocre.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-451-22711-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
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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