A charmingly eccentric sophomore effort.
A British memoirist and former artist gathers quirky personal essays about embarrassing personal predicaments in which “good intentions f[e]ll short.”
In her often amusing second book, Carew, whose first book, Dadland, won the 2016 Costa Biography Award, unabashedly highlights her unfortunate knack for attracting—or being attracted to—all manner of “mishap and misadventure.” She begins in 1976, the year she “bunked off school [and did] badly in my A-levels.” She flew to Toronto, where she met up with a friend named Ian, with whom she hitchhiked to Texas, where they made plans to travel South America in a VW Beetle they named Horace (“you give names to cars when you’re nineteen”). While on a camping trip in Lake Tahoe, the pair encountered a hulking former mercenary named Animal who showed them “bullet holes in his biceps and the scars on his chest” and made them flee, “too terrified to look back.” In the late 1980s, Carew careened into a long-term marriage with a New Zealander she had only met weeks before in London. Following their union, the pair flew to New Zealand. There, she stumbled into a short-lived career as a waitress and unknowingly ran into actor Sam Neill at a friend’s dinner party. Then the author’s peripatetic inclinations led her to Tunisia and, later, India, where she befriended local guides, one of whom adopted her husband as an “uncle,” tasking him with a proposed visit to the British internet girlfriend he wanted to marry. Carew’s misadventures also included many blunders at home in Britain, where she and her husband eventually settled: playing matchmaker for two “disaster-prone” friends; botching attempts at becoming a poet; and taking up gardening only to find that the act transformed her into a “constant murderer.” As the author chronicles how she all too often “ma[d]e a hash of [things],” Carew’s occasionally outlandish essays serve as witty reminders that laughter is very often the best—and sometimes only—defense against human foibles.
A charmingly eccentric sophomore effort.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78689-407-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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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