A woman of great strength and spirit pens a winning tale of survival.
Moving from WWII Bucharest to 1970s Los Angeles, a Jewish physician’s memoir details a remarkable journey that includes her escape from communist persecution and, later, her efforts to free herself from the bureaucracy of HMOs.
Immigrating to the United States in 1971, Lowe looks back on a difficult life spent on the brink of tragedy. Daughter of a prosperous Romanian doctor, the author endured the 1944 bombing of Bucharest, the threat of Jewish deportation and the rise of communism after the war. Striking details and extraordinary moments help lift the familiar story above standard WWII fare. An air-raid shelter in the basement of the Municipal Theatre–stage backdrops and actors’ costumes surrounding the hidden–offers strange surroundings to a night of bombing. Ice skates are converted to durable shoes when the family believes they will be forced out of the city on foot, the holes where the blades were attached filled with candle wax. The prose sometimes suffers from awkward phrasing and flawed syntax (English is not the author’s first language), but its peculiarities lend the writing personality and poignancy. After the war, Lowe took on the demanding academic route of following her father’s footsteps and becoming a doctor, a difficult feat at the time, especially for a woman and a Jew. The tales of the young doctor’s early years practicing in the countryside offer entertaining medical mysteries, made even more complicated by the limited supplies and compromised technology. A case of fever, sore throat and sudden death confounds authorities until Lowe, subscribing to the belief that the worst should be considered first, diagnoses diphtheria. In America, struggling with a new language, the author puts her all into passing the necessary exams to maintain her certification, setting up a thriving private practice. Although some of the episodes are too rushed and sketchy, failing to generate tension and feeling, the memoir succeeds as a quick, memorable tale of determination overcoming adversity.
A woman of great strength and spirit pens a winning tale of survival.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-4134-7465-7
Page Count: 147
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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