Suspiciously like a Brearley essay: Organized, researched, opinionated—with nothing below the neck. (Author tour)
Life since private school: neither a useful sociological study nor an intimate memoir.
Fishel (Family Mirrors, 1991) was one of 25 young women who graduated from New York City’s elite Brearley School in 1968, a year of widespread antiwar and anti-authority demonstrations, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and violent clashes between protesters and police at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. How did the Brearley group, emerging from an intellectually rigorous but socially insulated environment, fare as they moved into a world where traditional values were indeed being upended? Fishel chooses to follow ten of the women in detail, from their years in Brearley to the present. They coped or struggled in four distinct styles, discussed in chapters on the untraditional traditionalist, the unconventional career-tracker, the seeker, and the juggler. In essence, however, they were a rather boringly homogenous group, white, upwardly mobile, and upper middle class. All came from a background where "nice and not nice" were carefully defined, and any deviation from the rules was a closely guarded secret. Keeping the rules or keeping the secrets drove some of the women to suicide; more often the clash of cultures—virginity, white wine, and dancing school versus sex, drugs, and rock and roll, even at Vassar and Wellesley—set others adrift. "They often let choices choose them," says Fishel astutely. But what threw them sounds like no more than what throws most high school graduates set loose in a wider world: separation from family, search for identity, anxiety over newfound freedom. The Brearley girls stumbled to adulthood with the usual number of divorces, wrong career choices, and children, and perhaps a tad more social commitment and soul-searching than the average American. At the class’s 30th reunion, Fishel found them relatively content, but still searching for balance among love, work, and family.
Suspiciously like a Brearley essay: Organized, researched, opinionated—with nothing below the neck. (Author tour)Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-44983-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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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