A fast-paced read with nuggets of wine trivia that will appeal to anyone who has struggled to understand their parents.
A prickly young journalist reconnects with her father, a hot-tempered oenophile, on a wine trip through France.
Borel and her father, Philippe, have always had a rocky relationship. Philippe is a former chef and hotelier, and throughout Borel's youth, the family lived in hotels across the world. They finally settled in Quebec City, where Borel was involved in a fatal car accident. Though she was not at fault, the guilt of the other person's death still haunts her. Her father's response—or, in her opinion, lack thereof—plagues her too. Yet her love for her mysterious father, who shares her own bizarre brand of dark humor, transcends any lingering adolescent wounds, and the two embarked in a tiny car to meander through the French countryside. Throughout the trip, Borel grapples with two issues: her lack of wine “sense”—she could not even tell when a bottle was corked—and her father's looming mortality. Borel deftly captures the confusing emotions that surround parent-child relationships, especially the need for comfort and understanding that competes with a desire to rebel and establish one's own identity. Yet the author's gift for portraying that psychological whirlwind also causes the book to feel scattered at times. As she spirals through her existential crisis, the structure of the narrative flounders into semi-articulate emotional rants and only regains footing once she and her father are back on the road. Philippe's voice is so disarmingly charming and funny, however, that he assuages any sense of confusion on the part of the reader, and Borel, after these sidesteps. It is easy to understand the author's desire to bond with him.
A fast-paced read with nuggets of wine trivia that will appeal to anyone who has struggled to understand their parents.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-40950-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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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