A sequel of sorts to The Making of a Jew (1996). Between the making of deals, flying around on jets, and the eating of good brisket sandwichesall chronicled hereit's hard to tell when Bronfman had the time to write this odd but rather appealing book, part memoir and part savvy digest of big-business deal-making. The narrative offers a series of glimpses of Bronfman's business dealings at Seagram's, of which he is now the chairman, interspersed with glimpses of childhood events that Bronfman believes have helped shape his outlook and appetites. His family settled in Montreal and lived lavishly in an enormous home. But Bronfman remembers chiefly a lot of heavy furniture and dark rooms, and notes in passing that he rarely returns there. His job training, to his mind, began on the day of his birth. As the first son, he was automatically in line to take over the company and was expected to begin, at an early age, to master the business from the gorund up. His two older sisters were expected to stay out of his way. His oldest sister died still angry about being cut out of the business, but Bronfman notes that he has made peace with the rest of his family, including his mother, from whom he had been slightly estranged since childhood. Bronfman discusses his family and business life with great honesty and gives a short and harrowing account of the kidnapping of his son Sam in 1975. Bronfman's interests, like his company, are far-reaching, and he manages to pack in detailed discussions of such things as Du Pont stock options, Swiss gold, and the comforts of home in the short span of this book. President of the World Jewish Congress, he closes with an impassioned plea against anti-Semitism. While this is utterly harmless stuff, the book is likely to be of interest to only a small circle of readers.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-14374-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
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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