Anne Frank enthusiasts will wish for more about her, but van Maarsen offers valuable testimony about the particular tensions...
Called “Jopie” in Anne’s published diary, a childhood friend recalls her family’s history as it intersected with the Franks’ before, during and after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
Anne Frank does not appear until page 76, when the author recalls seeing after school one day in 1941 “a short, skinny girl with shiny black hair and rather sharp features.” The two quickly became friends, despite their differences: Jacqueline was reserved and conservative, while Anne was much more aggressive, frisky and curious about boys and sex. Van Maarsen remembers their many hours together playing ping-pong, watching rented movies, sleeping over, playing Monopoly, gossiping about classmates and film stars. One of the strongest moments here is her description of a visit to the Franks’ house immediately after their “departure.” (As the family intended, she believed they had fled to Switzerland and did not learn until after the war that they had been hiding in the secret annex of Otto Frank’s business). Van Maarsen saw Anne’s unmade bed, her new shoes lying on the floor, the entire house uncharacteristically unkempt, the breakfast dishes not yet washed. But Anne’s story consumes a small percentage of the pages here; it’s sandwiched between two long passages about the author’s French Catholic mother and Dutch Jewish father. The van Maarsens escaped deportation and murder only because of the mother’s Aryan status: She pulled strings to cancel the children’s registration as Jews, and her husband was permitted to remove his yellow star upon providing a (false) affidavit that he’d been sterilized. None of them knew the fate of the Franks until Otto returned after the war; it was not long thereafter that he and the author learned of his two daughters’ deaths at Bergen-Belsen.
Anne Frank enthusiasts will wish for more about her, but van Maarsen offers valuable testimony about the particular tensions and horrors her own family endured.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-905147-10-6
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Arcadia Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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