This volume takes the author (A Reasonable Life, 1993) and his artist wife into the sensuous heart of Italy and urges them to stay against the comic and idiosyncratic odds that MatÇ calls the Italian way of life. Tourists in search of a break from the pressured rituals of New York, the MatÇs alight upon the area around Montepulciano, begin house-hunting in earnest, and fall upon a sort of paradise that they turn into home at last. All of this is superimposed against the backdrop of Tuscan seasons, rituals, and rustic anecdotes—which are far more interesting than any of the author’s reflections upon them. MatÇ never crosses that great cultural divide that hangs like a mist between traveler and native, keeping his real subject (Tuscany? himself?) forever at bay. Almost 100 pages of his memoir are devoted to the comic surprises of house-hunting and its incumbent bureaucracy, in which MatÇ rarely steps outside of pure caricature. Blissful about his marriage, rapturous about food and wine, MatÇ spends considerable time describing the sounds of bells tolling in the valleys after lunch, the fluttering of linen, and the aroma of chestnuts heating on a grill. But in the end, his recollections of everything else are little more than hot-air balloons tethered to nothing in particular. Lunches launch and cap the author’s foray into this personal paradise and frame the friendships he developed with his neighbors in one dimension. He is more passionately observant about mushrooms, grapes, the flavor of new oil, and the simple rustic life than about the human beings who opened these pleasures to him. They’re the missing link that makes one wonder if MatÇ likes his Italian neighbors at all. Tuscany is a most compelling subject for the telling, but Sonoma might have been just as inspiring to this author. At its heart, the hills of Tuscany echo hollow when MatÇ asks to call them home. (15 drawings) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 12, 1998
ISBN: 0-920256-38-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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