A horrifying cautionary tale that reveals the vast dimensions of our vulnerability in the cyber age.
The story of a 30-something college student who employed an array of digital weapons to attack her writing professor, who loved her writing but rejected her amorous advances.
In a tale that sometimes seems more like a script for a horror film, novelist and short story writer Lasdun (It’s Beginning to Hurt, 2009, etc.) approaches his subject from a variety of perspectives. First, he provides a brisk narrative of the principal events: In the fall of 2003, he was a part-time teacher at a New York college (he changed the name); he greatly encouraged one of his students, an Iranian immigrant he calls Nasreen; after the course was over, they became email correspondents, and he helped her look for an agent and a publisher for her work; when her interest became more romantic, he backed off. And with her continued harassment, his hellish life commenced. Lasdun then pauses, returns to think about the classroom situation and to ask himself what he’d done—or not done—that might have contributed to this grievous misunderstanding. He looks for analogies (and solace) in literary works—among them Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which he summarizes at great length about a third of the way through, Macbeth, Strangers on a Train and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Penitent. Nasreen’s emails grew ever more crude and threatening (the author reproduces many of them), so Lasdun tried the FBI and the NYPD but with no real success. She posted vicious material on Amazon, Facebook and Wikipedia; she wrote to all of his publishers and to the institutions where he’d worked, accusing him of having sex with his students and stealing her material—even engineering her rape. She also forwarded in his name obnoxious and noxious material. A later section deals with Lasdun’s explorations of family roots and anti-Semitism.
A horrifying cautionary tale that reveals the vast dimensions of our vulnerability in the cyber age.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-21907-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
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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