A fact-filled, tiresome memoir that leaves readers wanting more of some topics and far less of others.
A member of a celebrity family shares her life story.
In a narrative that spans her entire life, Watson—a “Certified Laughter Yoga Leader” who founded and owned the beloved Books & Co. in New York City, which closed in 1997—also includes long chapters on her parents’ childhoods. Her father was a dark, moody man who ran his house as he ran IBM; her mother was a model and dated in the Kennedy family. Rather than showing us her life, the author delivers a chronological compendium of facts, holding readers at a distance rather than permitting any intimate looks at her life. Many times, it seems like Watson is merely jotting down details on the page without regard for their relevance of how they are organized—e.g., “my father used to buy all sorts of cheeses and delighted in tasting them. He enjoyed some classical music and would listen to Tchaikovsky over and over.” The author briefly discusses her bouts with depression but fails to delve deep enough into her situation to warrant much sympathy. The author’s life will be interesting to those who like to read about rich, celebrity families who live in a world of their own, filled with nannies and debutante balls, summers spent on the coast of Maine, European travel (“my parents took me to Paris, and we luxuriated at the Ritz. We ran into Rose Kennedy…”), attendance at prestigious schools, etc. Watson would have done better to focus on the latter part of her life, when she ran Books & Co. and began to study meditation, hands-on healing, and laughter yoga. Any of these topics, coupled with more in-depth coverage of her battle with depression, would have made the book much more engaging.
A fact-filled, tiresome memoir that leaves readers wanting more of some topics and far less of others.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-933527-99-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Turtle Point
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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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