Despite her strenuous attempts to be funny, more often than not, the author falls flat.
A travel memoir from the author of a popular blog.
Upon losing her comfortable job at a small board game company when the company went out of business, DeRuiter floundered for a while. It was 2008, the global economy was in recession, and she wasn’t sure what to do next. At her husband’s suggestion, the author started a travel blog, and the Everywhereist became immensely popular, eventually receiving mentions on several top-blog lists. DeRuiter’s first book recounts the circumstances that led to the blog, as well as stories about her eccentric parents, her life with her husband, Rand, and various exploits from their travels together. True to its title, the book wanders all over the place, and the result can be off-putting. The author’s observations rarely make it past surface level, and the witticisms for which she is known can be less-than-charming. In fact, without more substantive material to back them up, they grow tiresome. “That’s what’s incredible about love,” she notes at one point. “It’s nothing like the movies. It happens to mere mortals, manifesting while they’re standing in line for groceries or getting a dental check-up or renewing their license at the DMV.” Unfortunately, DeRuiter often delivers aphorisms that are less insightful than trite (i.e., love can happen to regular people), and the self-deprecating doubling-back doesn’t help: “I’m lying about that last one,” she continues in this particular passage. “Love has never, ever thrived at the DMV. That place is where love goes to die. But I’m pretty sure those other examples are sound.” Readers who are charmed by this sort of thing might find a lot to like here, but many will be exasperated by DeRuiter, who describes in gory detail an episode involving a clogged toilet but barely describes the places she actually visited.
Despite her strenuous attempts to be funny, more often than not, the author falls flat.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61039-763-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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