A witty, incisive portrait of contemporary France.
An American in Paris reflects on fantasy and reality.
When journalist von Sothen moved to Paris with his pregnant French actress wife, he counted on staying only a few years in the legendary city of beauty and sophistication. Now, 15 years later, he makes his book debut with a deft, shrewd, and entertaining take on his adoptive home, a place far different from how it is conveyed in winsome movies like Amelie and books like Peter Mayle’s sun-dappled A Year in Provence. Living in the multiethnic, economically diverse 10th arrondissement, von Sothen has observed at close hand homelessness, vagrancy, crime, and the plight of undocumented immigrants and refugees. Yet his Parisian community has felt safe, without the “palpable aggressiveness” that he sensed on his visits to America. In France, social programs provide for free or subsidized child care; free health care, including a doctor who will come to your home 24 hours a day; a good local public school; and laws that ensure affordable housing even in areas that are being gentrified. Although in some Parisian neighborhoods “streets were cleaner and ruined lives were less in your face,” the author prefers the gritty 10th to posh arrondissements that he once assumed were “the embodiment of French wonderfulness.” He skewers some of the customs that also once seemed enviable: long, frequent vacations and long, highly choreographed dinner parties. Every six weeks, schools have two-week breaks, during which working parents sign their children up for some extracurricular activity that will occupy them—or else depend on grandparents, “flown in like the Army corps of engineers,” to supervise. The summer break requires “planning as early as Christmas time” and vacationing—sometimes awkwardly—“en groupe” with assorted other couples. The presidential race between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen gives the author a chance to ring in on the “disenchantment and disillusionment” of French voters, who, he reports with admiration, “in the end, found their true north.”
A witty, incisive portrait of contemporary France.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2483-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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.
