An unexpectedly moving memoir.
A Canadian-born entrepreneur recounts how she went to Iran in search of culinary adventure and fell in love.
Klinec was the child of immigrant “striver” parents “for whom money and gain meant everything.” Wealth accumulated through an automotive manufacturing business transformed the love her mother and father had for her and her sister into “benevolent neglect.” Her parents granted Klinec an extraordinary amount of freedom, which, as a teenager, she used to enroll in schools in Switzerland and Ireland and travel all over Europe. While “the sense of motion…thrilled [her],” by the time she was 17, the author also found that she loved cooking. After attending university, she moved to London, where she went to work for an investment banking firm. But the financial security so important to her parents was not enough for her. In her early 30s, she left the corporate world to start her own artisanal foods cooking school, which she ran from her apartment. Fascinated by Middle Eastern culture and food, Klinec decided to go to Iran to find recipes. Less than 24 hours after she arrived in Tehran, a man named Vahid, whose “ ‘hello’ was more of a bark than a greeting,” approached her to practice his English. Vahid introduced Klinec to his mother, and the two women bonded as they prepared food together in the family kitchen. At the same time, the author fell in love with Vahid. Together, they sought out a mullah who would grant them status as “temporary” husband and wife and thus protect them from harsh Islamic laws against adultery. “Our relationship [was] stitched together out of fragments of devotion, strong will and despair,” she writes. Yet in the end, they found belonging—and emotional nourishment—in exile. By turns unsentimental and tender, Klinec’s book offers insight into the delicious world of Persian cuisine as well as the surprising twists and turns of the human heart.
An unexpectedly moving memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1455537693
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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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