Arresting, thought-provoking, frightening, glorious.
Long-time literary journalist Atlas (Bellow, 2000, etc.) contemplates life and death in 11 poignant essays that chronicle the trials of growing older.
Originally published in the New Yorker, this “personal history” has universal implications. “Mom and Dad,” “Home,” “Money,” “The Body”—who doesn't have a book’s worth of thoughts and anxieties about any one of these biggies? Discussing events and relationships we all experience, the 50-plus author presents himself as an everyman complete with wife, kids, and a career that’s had its ups and downs. He can’t help but yearn for the American dream of stability, money, and happiness, but more than that he wants to understand how life works and what it all means. Atlas tells the stories of his family, colleagues, and friends, a well-educated urban crowd who should by all rights be happier than most, if money and education are the measures. But it ain’t necessarily so. What makes My Life outstanding is the author’s gift for peeling the veneer from the ordinary to reveal the significance beneath; his tendency toward the melancholic can be forgiven when it comes paired with his incisive observations. His son’s tennis prowess, for instance, prompts reflections on the gradual deterioration of his body, as well as a recollection of the day not so long ago when Atlas beat his own old man for the first time. “Failure” takes as its departure point the time just a few years ago when Atlas was fired from a job, but the essay moves on to consider the mystery of what success means, and how we all torture ourselves over the wrong-headed choices we’ve made. These painfully honest pieces are remarkable when taken in smaller doses, but reading them all at one sitting could be a body blow for those of a darker disposition.
Arresting, thought-provoking, frightening, glorious.Pub Date: March 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-019629-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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
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