A book that focuses appealingly on the visceral complexities of our private lives.
Anthology of dramatic first-person testimonials collected by a driven author for whom a personal pastime became a public obsession.
This book reflects the website CraigslistConfessional.com, which Bala developed due to dissatisfaction with her demanding career as an attorney and lobbyist. She describes her work as “a project about hearing and seeing what others don’t—about pulling back the curtain that separates our secretive inner lives from our perfectly curated outer lives. My ‘job’ is to listen when no one else will.” At first, she was only seeking mutual catharsis; eventually, “I amended my original Craigslist ad to include a plan: I wanted to write these stories down and hopefully, some day, publish them.” She was so determined to pursue this that she curtailed her career to do so. The resulting volume is organized broadly, along the themes of “Love,” “Regret,” “Loss,” “Identity,” and “Family,” with 40 subjects across a spectrum of gender, social class, and age. Bala deftly captures these diverse voices—some gloomy, others hopeful—resulting in lively, empathetic biographical tableaux. She stays attuned to her anonymous subjects’ lived experiences, following arcs that sometimes lead from deviance or despair to redemption. One former prisoner notes after 15 years’ imprisonment, “the outside is cruel. It doesn’t care if you did the crime or you deserved your punishment, or you served your time.” Many stories concern flight from addiction or abuse, such as that of a young woman still ashamed of her years as an escort during college: “I was constantly trying to convince myself that it wasn’t so bad.” Episodes of loss include an older man reeling from the death of an alcoholic wife (“Up until the very end, I thought I could cure her”) and mothers haunted by the sudden deaths of children. Though some tales are maudlin or follow predictable patterns, readers should respond to the redemptive twist or optimism that often appears in the stories she has collected.
A book that focuses appealingly on the visceral complexities of our private lives.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982114-96-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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