Compact and well-executed.
Elliptical memoir depicting a girlhood of deception and gradually receding naïveté.
Poet Lederer captures in deliberate, observant prose a gradually deteriorating middle-class life in the 1970s and ’80s, noting that “what I relished was the togetherness that came with total family conflict.” The youngest child in a competitive intellectual clan that seemed closest during card games, she felt perpetually outsmarted by her savvy, distant brother and sister, fearful of the conflicts between her rigid teetotaler father and her alcoholic mother. (They eventually separated; later, her father achieved fortune with the Anguished English series.) Her brother Howard left home early. His first year as a New York gambler was a sordid disaster—for such individuals, Lederer notes, luck “resembles nothing more than a mangled version of hope”—but he eventually rose to the upper echelon of professional poker players, as did her “preternaturally vicious” sister. The comparatively conservative Katy attended prep school and Berkeley; then, intimidated by her literary ambitions, she apprenticed herself to Howard as a poker player, her volatile mother having previously joined his quasi-legal bookmaking operation, and in a scheme to start a glossy magazine, PokerWorld. Her narrative captures both the sleazy underground gambling milieu and the glossy allure of the high-roller scene at top Las Vegas casinos. Despite Howard’s guarded approval, poker denizens warn Katy away from the lifestyle; “you can make something better than this,” says one. Wearied, she heeds this advice, enrolling at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as Howard’s operations are shut down by the Las Vegas police for being part of “a $400-million-a-year illegal sports betting network.” Lederer’s meditation on family and chance is finely written, yet suffers from a curious stasis: by the conclusion, Howard’s legal troubles have evaporated, and her kin have returned to the world of high-stakes gaming. She perceives the past with acuity, but arrives at only modest personal judgments.
Compact and well-executed.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-609-60898-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
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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