Snyder (A Soldier's Disgrace, 1987, etc.) loses more than a job when he gets his walking papers from the university; his entire world shatters. Here, he mulls over his days of ruin and renaissance with an honesty that aches. Life had been good for Snyder before the fall: football scholarship, fat fellowships, the publication of several well-received books, then a gratifying job teaching English at Colgate, a fine family of three children. Out of the blue, Colgate upped and fired him. Surprise! Well, no problem, Snyder would simply find another teaching position, right? That was not to be, and his self-confidence faded fast. Snyder does a good job of dissecting the American Dream, how ``the little trap doors and hinges in her act'' revealed themselves quickly as his savings disappeared, how he slid down the slippery slope of self-pity, then crashed and burned in anger and fear. He pretty much bottoms out when he considers selling the baby he is convinced his wife is carrying. But the most powerful, as opposed to harrowing, material is found in the pitiful incidentals of his everyday life on the dole: how he would go to Sears to look at tires to clear his head; buy presents for his kids to bolster his esteem (his wife returned them); his obsession with budgets, as if in their numbers he would find some magic formula instead of diminishing reserves. It is all so immediate, so convincing, that it makes you cringe; it's terrifyingly easy to see yourself in Snyder's shoes. When he does finally get a break, readers will feel almost as relieved as Snyder did. Through the mill emerges a new Snyder, a better Snyder, his tale a cautionary one, as gruesomely captivating as a traffic accident.
Pub Date: April 21, 1997
ISBN: 0-316-80308-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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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