An upbeat guide for navigating an inevitable path.
An amusing collection of commentaries about coming to terms with aging and change.
Logan (Designs in Patchwork, 1987) delivers an assortment of breezy observations of the ordinary that gradually reveal more difficult meaning-of-life questions. She begins her musings by literally studying her own navel. Her once perfectly formed “in-ey” that sat in the middle of a flat stomach, she says, is now an ugly “out-ey,” deformed by surgery and age: “it looks like a damn elephant trunk.” It is, as it turns out, just the last straw in a series of accumulating, irksome indignities, all of which lead her to the greater issue she’s facing: “What is my place at this age?” Logan is an articulate writer with a delightfully sharp wit that’s directed as often against herself as against society at large, and she writes as if engaged in conversation with a close friend. Each chapter begins with a memory or reflection that, at first, seems unrelated to the topic at hand: her childhood days at the swimming pool or her observation that her husband has had a mysterious, late-in-life growth spurt. Then her thoughts take deft turns, and the connections become obvious: her time in the sun led to two basal cell carcinomas, and she discovered that she’d become half an inch shorter than she was a year before. At times, she can be poignantly philosophical, as when she tries to remember the last time she made a call from a phone booth. Why is it, she asks, that we can remember all the firsts but not the lasts? It’s because we usually don’t know the lasts will be the lasts, she says; we don’t think them important enough to record them in our mental data banks. Her advice? Embrace the moment one is in. Logan’s work will resonate primarily with her contemporaries, as she captures a recognizable cultural past and offers inspiration for moving forward, but younger women who are willing to risk a peek into the future will also find it useful.
An upbeat guide for navigating an inevitable path.Pub Date: July 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9863812-4-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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