A provocative, enlightening, humorous, and impressively executed guide to Amsterdam’s twilight world.
A memoir chronicling the education of a naïve American law school exchange student in Amsterdam in the late 1990s.
In a book that the author describes as part tragicomedy, part “survival guide,” Hollywood entertainment attorney Wienir (Making It on Broadway, 2004, etc.) chronicles his experiences during his third year at the University of California, Berkeley, law school, during which he moved to the Netherlands for a four-month semester. Although the purpose of his sojourn was to get legal experience abroad, Wienir also had intentions to write a book about Amsterdam’s notorious red-light district. He was hoping to dispel widespread misconceptions about it and offer a closer look into the area and its workers. After several weeks of culture shock, he learned a lot more than just the Dutch language. The wonderfully curious author describes the city as a “wonderland” of cannabis coffee shops, bicycle culture, and historical regions. He offers accounts of his adventures attempting to chat up sex workers for his book project (most rejected his offer) and excitedly befriending new drinking buddies. But he also offers astute observations, opinions, and an insider’s perspective on Amsterdam’s city-sanctioned prostitution. He brings his stories of sex workers—such as Emma, with whom he became emotionally connected—to vivid life with recollections of impassioned conversation and well-meaning friendship, and the overall tone never lapses into pity or judgment. Overall, Wienir is a delightfully frank tour guide, uniquely describing the district (including its 10 unspoken “commandments”) and drawing readers deep inside its sexy, neon-lit world. However, this book is not for the timid; the author doesn’t skimp on the details of his subjects’ professional escapades, nor does he underplay the emotional impact of his time in Amsterdam.
A provocative, enlightening, humorous, and impressively executed guide to Amsterdam’s twilight world.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9993559-0-9
Page Count: 203
Publisher: De Wallen Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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