Edgy, whimsical, and poignant essays about ordinary triumphs and travails.
A debut collection offers columns and op-ed pieces written for periodicals around the country.
Everyday pleasures, irritations, and quirks get center stage in Silverman’s essays. Whether she’s writing about the sublime joy of peanut butter, the inexplicable rudeness of neighbors who shovel their snow onto adjoining properties, the disappearance from the shelves of her favorite products, or the value of Post-it notes, her wry observations and musings ring with authenticity and familiarity. Not many people are so able to hold readers’ attention while discussing the perfection of yellow lined paper versus white. (Silverman does all her writing by hand.) Of the dreaded white pad, she declares: “It’s daunting, that blank surface, staring back at me. It is demanding and austere….‘Something you don’t like?’ it seems to suggest. ‘Well, learn to live with it.’ ” Then there’s her charming obsession with her old dictionary despite the unused new one sitting nearby: “Should I throw out the dictionary that I’ve used for twenty-five years, that has all but fallen apart? Or should I grant yet another stay of execution, and return it to its shelf?” In fact, a love of words, sentence structure, and books is evident throughout these carefully composed essays that maintain a comfortable, conversational tone. While most of her contemplations are light in nature, the conventional subjects—a shopping trip, the origin of a recipe, the tenacity of fallen leaves to return after they have been blown into a pile—are enhanced with humor and a delightful hint of snark. Still, the volume is best enjoyed in measured doses. Along the way, the author delivers some valuable words of wisdom. Especially tender are the sections that deal with the last few months of her mother’s life. Knowing she was dying, her mom wanted to visit her own mother’s grave. When she insisted on bending down to straighten the flowers they brought to lay at the gravesite, Silverman realized that this action was “the final gesture of a daughter saying goodbye to her mother.”
Edgy, whimsical, and poignant essays about ordinary triumphs and travails.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-87233-299-7
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Bauhan Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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