A schmaltzy but affecting memoir of a mostly vanished world.
The debut author, who has a long history in publishing as an editor, shares her stories about coming-of-age on the Lower East Side.
Webern’s minutely detailed memoir of growing up Jewish in downtown Manhattan from the 1930s through the early ’50s excellently evokes an era of pushcarts and projects, of hard times and harsh realities. Although the author doesn’t romanticize her memories, she drenches her anecdotes in affection. Even when her nearest and dearest are behaving their worst (as they often are), Webern writes with an eye for forgiveness—or at least understanding—and not judgment; that’s not to say she’s a pushover, but much of what she says comes with an Old World–style shrug. At one point, she thought nothing of gaming Eleanor Roosevelt’s free milk line: “We each got on line twice,” she writes of herself and her siblings. “Once with our hats on and once with our hats off.” Later, when she returned a dropped wallet to its proper owner, her mother screamed, “How do you know it was his? You think he’d tell you if it wasn’t his?” The younger Webern is, the better her stories are, and there’s a disarming naïveté in the way she talks about her mother’s various scams or how she earned her own “button thief” moniker. Every once in a while, she catches readers up short with the sheer, unaffected beauty of her observations. When her grandmother died, for example, she noticed that her mother’s once-lovely singing voice had become hoarse: “she has lost her voice crying for her dead mother.” However, there’s a perilously thin line between remembering and merely going on and on. Consider one saga, which begins innocuously enough with “My mother had a flair for plucking chickens.” After almost 15 pages of chicken filth, blood, and decapitations, readers will have had more than enough. The author’s seeming lack of an inner censor as a narrator blesses her with a hugely distinctive voice; on the other hand, a stronger editor might’ve helped. Still, readers who luxuriated in the 1987 Woody Allen movie Radio Days may find the 300 pages here to be not enough, as it shares that movie’s unique sense of time and place, of quarrelsome but beloved family.
A schmaltzy but affecting memoir of a mostly vanished world.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-944697-11-2
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Sagging Meniscus Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
