Lucid, sardonic, exciting, if more than slightly immature.
In four years as a photojournalist, Kogan charged into the world’s most dangerous places and fell in love with men from all over the northern hemisphere. Now in her 30s, she has written a smart-mouthed professional and sexual memoir.
Raised in Potomac, Maryland (a stable, functional period she covers in flashbacks), Kogan graduated from Harvard, moved immediately to Paris, and signed with a major photo agency. As a young, petite blonde, she was sent alone to photograph warring mujahideen in rural Afghanistan, heroin addicts in northern Europe, jungle scuffles in Zimbabwe, and the fall of Communism in Russia and Romania. She was never alone for long: each chapter in her chronology is named whatever man she was obsessed with at the time, and there were plenty more besides these. Her professional life is fascinating—and her photos of Romanian orphans are unforgettable—but she seems more concerned with romance, and keeps returning to the subject again and again in the best adolescent style. Kogan is a brilliant, clear-headed writer, breezing through details and dialogue as though each event happened yesterday, and creating real suspense through age-appropriate voice shifts: she recounts her early 20s in four-letter words, then gradually softens as she crosses that decade and grows up. The present-tense narrative alternates nicely with out-of-order flashbacks triggered by theme. To her credit, this senior member of Gen X never takes herself too seriously; if the last chapter leaves an odd aftertaste, it’s the sense that Kogan does not appreciate the rarity of a life of adventure and nonstop romance. Especially for readers with wanderlust, the book is an ideal companion to journalist Geraldine Brooks’s Foreign Correspondence (1997)—younger and tougher, but driven by a similar life trajectory.
Lucid, sardonic, exciting, if more than slightly immature.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50364-1
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
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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