Corporate flack Meyer (The Memphis Murders, not reviewed) tells his own story, from rags to riches to outplacement hell. It's the diary of an insulted man. In 38 years of nonstop employment the author progressed from soda jerk to newspaper reporter to VP in charge of public relations for McDonnell Douglas. Then, one day, he personally was downsized (read ``fired''). Pushing age 50, equipped with a financial departure package and a briefcase bulging with rÇsumÇs, Meyer scoured the land for suitable employment in an environment he had come to loathe. Put aside were the daydreamspiloting a tractor- trailer out West, fry cooking while wearing a paper hat, or simple armed robberythere was the family to consider. After fruitless peregrinations and hopeless quests, dispiriting networking and mendacious headhunters, he found a likely spot with a manufacturer. That soon proved a mistake. He was downsized again. And yet again after that. In the end you want Meyer to get permanent employment as much as he does. Emotions rage: anger, envy, fear, shame, self- pity, and above all, resentment. The mordant text picks at a wound slow to heal, and for those who never labored in a corporate gulag, it may seem to moan too much. But for the increasing numbers who have had to deal with ``human resource'' drones, outplacement geeks, and inane job interviews, this narrative of the precipitous decline and fall of a once self-assured pro will resonate. Meyer notes that ``something is shutting down permanently in America, coming to an end.'' Certainly the bond of loyalty between employer and employee is ended, as this book graphically demonstrates. A moral for employers: think again about firing an employee who has the talent to write about it and a penchant for sharp character sketches. Here's a funny, frank, and underlying it all, melancholy journal of a painful journey. (First serial to Harper's)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-879957-22-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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