A delectable, well-crafted memoir.
Salon.com senior editor Moses (Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath, 2003, etc.) shares an emotive life framed by sugary sweets.
The author grew up in Palo Alto, Calif., in the 1960s, and her mercurial, struggling-artist mother co-dependently bonded amid a male-dominated household. A “compliant, tidy daughter,” Moses recalls sugar being the “mainstay of my diet as a child,” which only amplified her “cake obsession” as an adult. The author recalls fond memories of her San Franciscan relatives, especially her “parsimonious old coot” of a grandfather who demonstrated an uncanny knack for fudge-making and trolling the dump for discarded treasures. Her confident mother subsisted within a “fairly constant thrum of creative emergency,” demonstrated in the crafting of spectacular birthday cakes for her children like three-dimensional bunnies and an elaborate gingerbread Noah's Ark. Though Moses believed her parents to be “disastrously mismatched,” they managed to keep the family unified throughout frequent relocations to various East Coast locales to accommodate her father's job, as well as a move from Virginia to Alaska in 1974 that created significant riffs in her parent's marriage. In the years that followed, the author found contentment in random boyfriends, her college days back in California, a prized editorial job at North Point Press in Berkeley, where she befriended authors like M.F.K. Fisher and Kay Boyle, and in creating a family of her own. Deliberate, sensitive and meticulous, the narrative brims with dense, curiously exacting detail, and each chapter closes with a tempting, uncomplicated recipe.
A delectable, well-crafted memoir.Pub Date: May 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-34298-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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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