Compassionate but repetitive.
A New York–based blogger's memoir as told through a series of epistolary essays that apologize to individuals he knew as an adolescent and adult for his bad behavior toward them.
In this book, self-revelation is inextricably bound with contrition. Bry begins his narrative in junior high, a time when, among other things, he offered two of his classmates and fellow "dorks" fake drugs and stole beer from the refrigerator of friends' parents so that his peers would see him as "cool." As he grew older, his immature behavior developed a distinctly darker, more self-destructive edge. He drank heavily, experimented with marijuana, cocaine and other drugs, betrayed friends and disappointed those closest to him, including his terminally ill father. On the day he died, Bry did not hear his cries for help and came to him only after it was too late. "I felt like a little boy who had just broken something important,” he writes. Even after his father's death, Bry continued drinking, smoking pot and being a "dick" to everyone. He nearly failed out of college but managed to graduate and stumble into an internship at a music magazine in New York. He passed his 20s in a stupor, yet still found love with a woman who was as "generously accepting of his lifestyle choices" as she was of his being a sweatpants-wearing slob. The form Bry uses to tell the story gets tiresome, as does his constant apologizing to everyone (including people with whom he had only glancing contact) for his misdeeds. However, his candor and genuine desire to look at the ugliest parts of his personality and past do succeed in creating a compelling portrait of a human "work in progress."
Compassionate but repetitive.Pub Date: March 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1455509164
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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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