An intriguing, albeit subjective, look at some of this century’s most interesting people. Lapierre (The City of Joy, 1985, etc.) has had the writing gig of the century. As a reporter for Paris Match, among other periodicals, he has traveled the world and chronicled some seminal historical moments. Here he recounts meetings with everyone from Mother Teresa to Mahatma Gandhi. Particularly riveting—and grippingly written—is a chapter on the last days of death-row inmate Caryl Chessman, who insisted on his innocence to his dying breath. Lapierre interviews Chessman six times and records firsthand each last-ditch effort to save the man, who eluded execution eight times in 12 years. The California judge’s call to stay the execution one last time reached the prison five seconds after the cyanide pills had been dropped into the sulfuric acid. Interspersed with the “interviews” is Lapierre’s own story, which raises this quibble: The book seems a tad self-serving at times. Was the famous bullfighter El Cordobes really a vital 20th-century figure—one of the “thousand suns” referred to in the Indian proverb from which the book derives its title—or is he a convenient, albeit fascinating, means to remind the reader that Lapierre and Larry Collins wrote a book (Or I’ll Dress You in Mourning) based on their Reader’s Digest profile of the Spaniard? Still, the book is lively and Lapierre a terrific tour guide. Besides, it’s hard to dislike an author who has used millions of dollars in book royalties to help bring medical care to desperately indigent people in Calcutta, a point Lapierre carefully annotates in an appendix that outlines the work he has accomplished there and in the Ganges Delta before giving addresses for readers who want to make donations. Memoir or selective chronicle of a century? Regardless, you’ll keep reading. (30 b&w photos)
Pub Date: March 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-446-52535-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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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