Spirited stories about appreciating life’s vagaries.
This follow-up volume of 13 autobiographical essays depicts a life “on destiny’s merry-go-round,” alternating witty anecdotes of good luck and bad.
Aboulafia (Snapshots from My Uneventful Life, 2015, etc.) believes “we are a reflection of what we experience in this world,” which in his case means a blend of minor disasters, averted crises, and everyday epiphanies. Even as a child, he tested his limits and assessed relationships. “Date Nut Bread,” about a dubious 1970s foodstuff from a can that often appeared in his lunchbox, was a symbol of his mother’s failure to understand kids; others got trendy treats like Oreos and salami. “The Test” recalls his alarmingly low IQ test score when entering first grade—though his reasoning was actually more advanced than the test could show. He objected that a drawing of a smiling cat jumping into a car didn’t represent happiness because cats don’t like riding in cars. Such analytical thinking skills later served the author well as a school administrator and lawyer. As in the first book, he gets a lot of comic mileage out of his youthful indiscretions, such as speeding while in possession of a suspended driver’s license. But he was still making laughable mistakes into adulthood, like when he and his wife ordered martinis from their Cape May hotel bar, not realizing they were the size of eight regular drinks. The longest essay, “Death By Whatever,” is a rollicking tale of multiple hazards narrowly avoided on a Florida vacation, such as big waves, horseflies, and barracudas. “The Ring” is the almost Solomonic fable of Aboulafia and his brother fighting over their ill father’s pinky ring, while “Scrooged!” tells of an office prank pulled on mean-spirited co-workers. Some of the more serious pieces—one about an oil burner repairman who taught him to let go of anger and another about spreading the ashes of his father’s friends—are so short they’re over before they’ve hardly begun. Overall, there are fewer memorable moments and an irksome superfluity of italics, but the mischievous tone still shines through.
Spirited stories about appreciating life’s vagaries.Pub Date: June 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78099-374-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Roundfire Books
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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