The author’s romantic entanglements may fail to engage the reader, but she provides a vivid portrait of the currently...
A journalist’s account of her voluntary chastity.
Anderson, a 30ish, single woman about town in London and New York, had always found sex easy but love elusive. She was spurred to rethink her approach to relationships with men after seeing an ex-boyfriend escorting his girlfriend into a jewelry store. Saying no to sex would, she hoped, help her find love. The story of her venture into a flirty sort of chastity began in July and ended in August of the following year, with most chapters dealing with a single month. While recounting her adventures and misadventures, she philosophizes about sex, dipping into feminist history, psychology and sociology. While shopping for a chaste wardrobe, she muses on what women communicate by what they wear, and a movie date launches her into a discussion of the depiction of sex on the screen, from Hepburn and Tracy in Adam’s Rib to Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn in The Break-Up. Men abound in this memoir, some alive and present, others as colorful memories. The author asserts that “while closing myself off physically, I’ve opened up more psychologically,” and that her year without taught her many things about relationships. However, a disastrous sexual liaison at the year’s end indicates that may not have been quite the case. Though her experience didn’t bring her true love, it provided her with some titillating journalistic material.
The author’s romantic entanglements may fail to engage the reader, but she provides a vivid portrait of the currently pervasive culture of casual sex.Pub Date: June 24, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02186-4
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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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