In a book that is as much a paean to smoking as it is a eulogy, Hens is both poetic and unforgiving about the pleasures and...
A memoir about cigarette smoking whose meditations provide an intellectual frame for the addictive habit.
In his unorthodox and candid memoir, German writer and translator Hens discusses his longtime addiction to cigarettes, his eventual recovery, and the ongoing battle with his addictive personality to fight the ever present urge to smoke. However, the author’s writing surpasses the redemptive arc of many other addiction narratives. Hens does not portray himself as a pitiable figure seeking sympathy, nor does he tout a sense of moral superiority for kicking his habit. Instead, he offers a meditative, philosophical inquiry into his addiction and the pleasure he derived from smoking. From an account of his very first cigarette, which was handed to him as a child of 5 or 6 by his mother to light a New Year’s rocket, to a description of the nicotine rush as the moment “I became myself for the very first time” to an exegesis on the psychology of the “last” cigarette, Hens is sentimental about the lost pleasures of smoking, but he does not dwell in nostalgia. The author is interested in plumbing his memory for vignettes that narrate but do not explain away his addiction. For Hens, the greatest pleasure of smoking is the quotidian, the reflective moment afforded by smokers to observe the world and themselves more attentively. Moreover, the author does not preach the negative health effects of smoking. As someone who admits to smoking more than 100,000 cigarettes before quitting, in his postscript, Hens rather fittingly invites readers to enjoy a smoke. The author is an idiosyncratic stylist whose sentences are often terse and elliptical, and Calleja’s translation ably captures his unique voice.
In a book that is as much a paean to smoking as it is a eulogy, Hens is both poetic and unforgiving about the pleasures and pains of smoking.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59051-793-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
PROFILES
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
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
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