May 4, 1991, was ``Eugenia Price Day'' on Georgia's St. Simons Island—a 75th birthday and general ``I-Love-You-E.P.'' celebration organized by the writer's friends and publishing company. The occasion so moved this author of 37 books (among them inspirational titles and historical series like the Savannah Quartet) that she paused while working on her follow-up to Bright Captivity (1991) to write this little thank-you note to all the people who made her what she is today—a very successful writer indeed, with hundreds of thousands of fans whom she thanks right along with Doubleday president Stephen Rubin and her agent, editor, sales reps, typist, and yardworker. Along the way, Price reveals some fascinating personal facts- -that she and her longtime companion, Joyce Blackburn, bought burial plots on St. Simons before they bought their house; that Price named her Buick LeSabre after the protagonist of the Savannah Quartet; and that she includes God (``Him'') while making publishing decisions with her agent. To Price aficionados, it will make sense that, as a reader, the author prefers biographies to fiction (since her own novels favor character over plot), though it may prove disappointing to hear how Price delegates research tasks. But, mostly, fans will hold this valentine to their bosoms, even though Price warns that establishment critics will find it ``schmaltzy, dripping with sentiment.'' Well, yes—not to mention a little too ingenuously good-willed. But there's a broader lesson here: Price has spent three decades listening to her own creative voice, never trying to be all things to all people—and so she has endured. (Twenty b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: May 19, 1992
ISBN: 0-385-42321-7
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992
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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