Harrowing discourse on chain-smoking, despite the lack of a real narrative chain.
A distressed writer for a health magazine describes the nutty stratagem she devised to break herself of the curse of tobacco.
The author’s attempt goes well beyond nicotine gum or the patch. She locked herself in at home for a week, out of the reach of cigarettes, with 72 feet of steel chain. It’s a bizarre tale of passion and lust for a malign love—the love of nicotine (preferably in the form of mentholated cigarettes with a filter tip). Hansen narrates her history of panic attacks and cuttings and alcoholism and a stay in a psych ward, but her chief demon, as she reports, is smoke. The brume of Newports, the fog of Marlboros, was attractive in high school, cool when she was a Playgirl editor, the rule when she composed pornography and a concealed pleasure when she wrote for health publisher Rodale. The obsession for another and yet another ciggie attended her difficult dealings with various good guys and diverse bad men. Then she married big, sweet John, who agreed, for her sake and the sake of her young son, to lock her in chains each hellish day. The reader is enlisted as confessor to an extravagant chronicle of being fettered to a radiator, cranked up on dopamine. With minor forays into the history of smoking and the technology associated with it, this is largely highly wrought introspection. Included, like a visit from the Ghost of Smoking Past, is a dialogue with her younger self. In her bravura text, Hansen stretches with similes like “our styles of worship clashed like an old man’s golf attire” and “trailing loneliness like toilet paper on the heel of a shoe.”
Harrowing discourse on chain-smoking, despite the lack of a real narrative chain.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-8958-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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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