An absorbing chronicle of a personal journey with broader implications.
Multifaceted poet and author Braverman (Wonders of the West, 1993, etc.) renounces her native Los Angeles for rural upstate New York in a series of wry, trenchant geography lessons.
“Fusion City,” the first essay in this collection, describes the author’s upbringing as a poor welfare kid in late-1950s LA, before it became “the destination city,” famous for film and media. In a pithy pronouncement characteristically stripped of sentimentality, Braverman writes, “Our Los Angeles was where you went after divorce and scandal, bankruptcy, foreclosure, imminent starvation, bad health, and personal exile.” Subsequent chapters return to this squalid, scintillating city, but only in memory. In 1994, she fled the West Coast with her husband and teenaged daughter to live for six years in a fabulously spacious old farmhouse in the punishing snow belt at the base of the Allegheny Mountains. There, as she records in six “transmissions” to her old hometown, she reinvented herself as a gardener astonished by the change of seasons, a protector of the four deer that frequented her property in spite of hunters. “Transmission to Los Angeles #3” is a meditation on female friends who also left LA, for more fulfilling pursuits. “Escaping Los Angeles: Uncle Irving’s Advice” and “Hunting and Trapping Aunt Sarah” channel the author’s Russian-Jewish ancestors, who came to the Promised Land via Ellis Island. In “The Collective Voice of Los Angeles Speaks: Marilyn Monroe,” Braverman allows the “icon, oracle and prophet” to define the phenomenon of “personal history fusing with the sanctity of fame”; it’s the book’s least personal and satisfying piece. “P.S. House for Sale” is a longwinded, tongue-in-cheek realtor’s ad for the author’s East Coast farmhouse. Braverman now lives in San Francisco.
An absorbing chronicle of a personal journey with broader implications.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-55597-438-4
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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