A meandering journal of novelist Grumbach's 74th year that chronicles a final move from Washington, D.C., to the coast of Maine, and that includes brief, often charming, reflections on such diverse topics as mayflies, oxymorons, authors, and death. A follow-up to Coming into the End Zone (1991), which recounted Grumbach's ``intensely despondent'' 71st year, these month-by-month notes seek to examine whether the author's despair has lifted—and whether ``I may come upon some answers to the insistent questions of old age. Or perhaps only succeed in recording the minor thoughts and activities in the life of an aging woman.'' Grumbach begins her journal year with the publication of End Zone and ends it with a ``meditation'' on home, in particular her home in Maine, where she's found ``an interior landscape of serenity, isolation and solitude'' and has become less ``grumpy.'' In between, she offers snippets from La Rochefoucauld, Emerson, Anatole Broyard, and others; descriptions of life in Maine; accounts of her speeches, meetings, and book signings along the Maine/Washington corridor; entertaining anecdotes about the famous and not-so-famous; glimpses of family matters, centered around a daughter's cancer; a musing on love—all nuggets from which novelists craft their tales, but here unconnected and unshaped. Grumbach's work here will inevitably be compared to that of her friend May Sarton: Both are novelists removed to Maine, both are publishing journals on aging. Grumbach, however—probably because she's relatively younger, healthier, and more active than Sarton- -offers an account that's livelier, more wide-ranging, and less self-absorbed, though not much more profound. Written with polish and erudition, here are some budding insights into—but no answers to—the questions of old age.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03541-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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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