Light and lively reading with an understated edge.
A peripatetic 30-something Englishwoman’s account of how a Greek island “got under [her] skin” and showed her the way to contented self-direction.
When Barclay (The Traveller's Friend: A Miscellany of Wit and Wisdom, 2011, etc.) was studying ancient Greek at Hulme Grammar School for Girls, she never imagined that Greece would eventually become her personal North Star. All through her adolescence, she returned to it during her holidays, and after she graduated from college unclear about what to do next, she went to Greece to teach English and “have the adventures that life should be about.” Work eventually took her to Canada, where she married, divorced, and spent more than five years living and traveling around the world with a man she believed was “the one.” The relationship ended with her realizing that she wanted a child and that time was running out for her to have one. Barclay once again turned her attention to Greece, hoping that this time it could be “a good cure for love.” So she went to the tiny island of Tilos, where she became the unwitting romantic interest of another suitor. Barclay returned home to England and began dating once more, only to be disappointed yet again. She found solace in the arms of a friend, Matt, who unexpectedly became her lover and, later, fiance. Together, the two planned to return to Tilos to live and eventually raise a family, but the fairy tale came to an abrupt end when Barclay discovered that Matt had lied about almost everything, from his job to his ability to have children. Yet Barclay remained unfazed by romantic disappointment. In the end, she realized that “it was always meant to be all about [her] and Tilos,” not about the fragile romantic relationships that too often undermined her hopes and dreams.
Light and lively reading with an understated edge.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4022-8510-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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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