A love story of rare quality: intelligent, wise, and, above all, generous in spirit and understanding.
In a perfectly pitched and insightful account, physician David Gurewitsch’s widow lovingly recalls her husband’s abiding friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt.
First and foremost this is a love story—not the usual romantic kind, but one celebrating a spiritual and intellectual affinity that impelled Roosevelt to write that she loved Gurewitsch “as I have never loved anyone else.” He was a Jewish doctor, 18 years her junior, born in Switzerland and raised by his grandparents in Russia while his widowed mother studied medicine. He became a doctor in Germany, then emigrated in 1936 to New York, where he practiced medicine and lived with his first wife. He first met Roosevelt while paying a house call on friends of hers, and when she moved to New York, he became her personal physician. Their deeper friendship began in 1949 on a delay-plagued flight to Switzerland. With time to talk, both found they had much in common, in particular lonely, fatherless childhoods and a determination to help those in need. Gurewitsch was soon accompanying Roosevelt on official visits to the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and India and spending numerous weekends at her Hyde Park cottage. Quoting from their letters and his journals, Edna Gurewitsch describes those years before her own meeting with the now-divorced David. Roosevelt feared their marriage in 1958, but typically she soon included Edna in her life as well. In 1959, the three became co-owners of the Manhattan townhouse where Roosevelt lived until her death. The author recalls her meetings there with the great and famous, enriching the historical record with her acute observations. But her perceptive insights into Mrs. Roosevelt are the real gems here. She came to love and admire the former first lady as “one of the few people in this world in which greatness and modesty could coexist.”
A love story of rare quality: intelligent, wise, and, above all, generous in spirit and understanding.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28698-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
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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