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LONELY

A MEMOIR

White makes the case that loneliness deserves attention and respect as a legitimate condition.

For research lawyer White (Law and Society/Memorial Univ.), loneliness was not a transient mood but a life condition with crushing implications.

Loneliness affected the author early on in life, with her fears of empty places, especially her home after school—siblings out, mother at work, father a weekend dad through divorce. White experienced the afternoons as a frightening isolation, just when she was starting to define herself as an individual. The author approaches her sophisticated inquiry from a variety of angles: biological, cultural, social and psychological. In the medical world, loneliness is an ambiguous condition, only now becoming recognized as a distinct state of being. There have been studies about its genetic basis, as well as its physical debilitations, such as lowered immunity, premature aging and high blood pressure—all of which are easy to understand as White painstakingly sets about detailing her persistent sense of isolation, lack of intimacy and embarrassment. “Loneliness,” she writes, “at the start of the wired-up twenty-first century, was so totally nowhere, so crushingly uncool.” The author was both beseeching and incredulous at the existential absurdity of it all—“As my need for others intensified, I began to retreat from them.” When social situations presented themselves, she became stressed at interacting, so she would spend more time alone. The power of White’s story comes from the sweeping investment she has made in tracking and tackling her loneliness—an investment that has included Jungian analysis, hypnotherapy, bowling clubs, bike trips, Internet dating and much more.

White makes the case that loneliness deserves attention and respect as a legitimate condition.

Pub Date: March 9, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-06-176509-4

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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