A memoir about the aftermath of violence, from an unexpected perspective. On a balmy afternoon in the late summer of 1988, Kalven received a phone call that effectively blocked out the sun: His wife, a professional photographer and dedicated runner, had been attacked. Rushing to the hospital, he discovered that she had been severely beaten and assaulted, but not raped. His relief, however, was premature. What he couldn—t know that afternoon in the emergency room was that his wife’s assailant had stolen her freedom and faith—qualities that she would never again recover in their original forms. He knew only that she was alive. In the subsequent days, weeks, and years, he gained knowledge of the excruciating process of recovery. In his memoir of the five years following the assault, he documents his wife’s slow, difficult healing as her partner, husband, lover, and professional collaborator. What might have been a testament to one woman’s transcendence of violence is instead a story of a marriage—and the way in which one man attempts to understand how his life has been irrevocably transformed by a single, horrifying event. To his credit, Kalven doesn’t hesitate to write about the ambivalence he feels, his own guilt, his wife’s fury. He grieves openly on the page, for what has been lost, and observes his own conflicted feelings about his gender and sexuality with careful, measured words. And yet the narrative has a curiously static quality; it seems to turn inward again and again in a tightly drawn spiral of self-interrogation. The effect can be exhausting; one longs for a sense of momentum, of resolution. But there is none to be found. In that way, the narrative perhaps echoes the process of recovery too closely; the demands of the form insist on closure whether or not it has been achieved in life.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04690-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
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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