An intimate memoir of love and loss in the shadow of 9/11.
On September 11, 2001, art historian Frey (Toulouse-Lautrec: A Life, 1995) and her husband, novelist Ronald Sukenick, lived in Battery Park City, where, from their 26th-floor apartment across from the World Trade Center, they witnessed that day’s terrorist attacks. This book is Frey’s diary-style account of the events of 9/11 and the six months that followed, which she endured while caring for her terminally ill partner. Her descriptions of the attacks and the chaotic evacuation of area residents are vivid, bringing immediacy to events most know only through pictures. Later, after she returns home, military checkpoints isolate her shattered neighborhood from the rest of Manhattan, while outside there’s a scene of unbearable devastation, as workers sift through rubble in a bleak search for the dead. At this point, Frey delves deeper, exploring the long-term impact of 9/11 and the challenges of caring for the frequently irascible Ronald, whose illness—inclusion body myositis—severely limits his mobility. While Frey strives to remain strong under increasing pressure, she begins to crack when faced with the constant presence of Ground Zero, the strain of supporting a failing spouse and the stress of a complicated love triangle. The disaster area outside her windows mirrors her mental distress; she compares her anger to “fire in the ruins.” As the book progresses, however, some of Frey’s readers may begin to lose patience, echoing the complaint of one friend that Frey has become “self-absorbed and obsessive.” Still, Frey resists the temptation to paint herself as a saint, instead writing with candor about her guilt, depression, fear and impatience, while also conveying her commitment to her husband, marriage and forging a path back to normalcy. While Frey’s writing is solid, if not spectacular, the book’s real power is its unflinchingly honest—if occasionally uncomfortable—discussion of the painful realities of love, illness and death. Engaging and candid; an insightful look at how one woman copes with personal and national trauma.
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-1461138242
Page Count: 280
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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