A “typically sane middle-aged mother” of two reinvents herself and her family with a spontaneous sabbatical to her central European origins.
In Des Moines, Iowa, travel writer Wilson and her architect husband Jim purposefully led what they imagined to be the idyllic, comfortable “American Dream,” but both harbored feelings of disenchantment and restlessness. When Wilson’s great-aunt, Sister Mary Paula, died in 2008, inside a box of her personal papers the author discovered a handwritten history of the nun’s parents’ life in sparsely populated backwoods Mrkopalj, Croatia. Despite the plummeting stock market depleting half of their collective savings, the opportunity presented itself for both Wilson and her husband to realize a dream of not only living overseas, but reconnecting with her maternal Croatian ancestry and the village inhabited by her great-grandparents. After an eye-opening dry-run to desolate “one-chicken town” Mrkopalj using her press credentials, it then took some delicate finagling with her two children to finally embark the family on an intrepid one-year stay in the mountainous Croation “Motherland.” Expected culture-clash calamity ensued: The rooms they’d rented were stuck in mid-construction, language barriers with native Croats often stymied them and the drinking habits of the locals became troublesome. Eventually, Wilson developed a deeper genealogical understanding and a greater appreciation of her heritage. The author’s voice is consistently infused with an energetic spunkiness, complimented with passages of sage introspection. Though her adventures had patches of both good and not-so-good, Wilson still believes her family’s grand jaunt abroad was a risky yet overwhelmingly beneficial move that trumped spending “the rest of our days stagnating on a couch in middle America.” Armchair travelers will find vicarious thrills in Wilson’s long-winded yet appealing travelogue of discovery and renewal.
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-59895-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
