A drawn-out, sometimes-amusing examination of the author's search for a loving relationship with a man, any man.
One woman's confessions about not having a love life.
Beginning with her first boy infatuation at age 7 and advancing to the ripe age of 25, Heaney takes readers on an exhaustive, descriptive jaunt through her multiple boy crushes and attempts to obtain a boyfriend. Readers who get through the first 20 pages without thinking “who cares” may enjoy the author’s self-deprecating humor, which borders on unfunny as she laments and bemoans her fate. She claims, however, that "[m]ost of the time it does not upset me to think about my sad, old, decrepit spinster body…not having a boyfriend at any given moment bothers me very little. Not having ever had one bothers me only slightly more." Tongue in cheek, Heaney reminisces about boys from kindergarten and beyond—their hair, the way they talked, how she felt around them, what she wrote in her diary back then; she quotes to emphasize her points. This sets the tone as she proceeds to delve deeply into her affections, near loves and possible first dates in high school, college and graduate school. She tried drinking, being flirty, being distant and aloof, and even succumbed to the oftentimes humiliating moments of setting up an online dating profile only to discover that some men send the exact same message to every single woman. Throughout multiple near hits, an occasional kiss or two, and numerous boy friends but no boyfriends, the author has maintained her circle of girlfriends to gossip with, run to for advice and downright hate when any of them lands the guy they both secretly desired. Heaney's misadventures are more a testament to the power of friendship among women than anything comical regarding her struggle to find real love.
A drawn-out, sometimes-amusing examination of the author's search for a loving relationship with a man, any man.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4555-4467-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
