Vivid background partially redeems a dispiritingly familiar tale of a bright woman doing dumb things.
Debut memoir ruefully recalls a love affair that imploded in Russia during in the late 1990s.
In 1998, six years after their intense but platonic friendship in college, TV producer Cohen learned that Kevin Dillard was working as a journalist in Russia. She e-mailed him for help on a story she was doing about Russian prostitutes in the US, and they were soon corresponding regularly. When Dillard promised to show her a juicy piece of evidence seemingly implicating President Clinton and a prostitute on a recent state visit, Cohen (for whom “journalistic prowess is a potent aphrodisiac”) persuaded her boss that she needed to visit Russia to wrap up her story. She flew to St. Petersburg, and within weeks Dillard proposed; they planned a fall wedding, and her parents started preparations. At first, Cohen wasn’t concerned that Kevin was divorced, a recovering alcoholic, and past drug user; she herself had been bulimic and was still on antidepressants. The couple moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow, where Cohen was to be a network producer for a foreign bureau. Despite their landlord’s promises of renovations, their apartment had no bathroom door, and the wires and pipes were exposed. Over the summer, she covered attacks by neo-Nazi skinheads, the city’s pervasive corruption, and the Mafia’s exploitation of young women. Dillard, unfulfilled by his job, started drinking, saw old girlfriends, and attempted suicide. Like the Russian economy that summer, their love affair entered freefall; Cohen suggests they had both been deceived by a culture that romanticizes tragedy and deifies romance. Mostly an account of an impulsive decision with unforeseen consequences, this is more interesting for its secondary descriptions of life in post-communist Russia, as the self-absorption typical of the memoir genre soon cloys.
Vivid background partially redeems a dispiritingly familiar tale of a bright woman doing dumb things.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-299-20100-7
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Terrace Books/Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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