A kind marital gesture, but lacking universality.
Kirsch’s travelogue-cum-soul-search contains ruminations on what he learned from four days in London.
The diary-style narrative recounts the first leg of a weeklong European trip Kirsch and his wife Julie take to celebrate their 40th birthdays and 15th wedding anniversary. Like many Americans abroad, the narrator expresses impatience and disappointment with the Old Country. Why is it so stuffy, so inconvenient, so boring, so expensive? Where can a guy get a good steak? He takes the macho tone, albeit in a good-natured way–poking fun, scoffing, opting out whenever art or culture rear their ugly heads. The National Gallery? Yawn. Billy Elliot? “A chick play.” Big Ben? Big deal. While Julie visits the British Museum, the author sits in a café and reads the sports page. Julie comes to Europe with reverence, toting guidebooks, lists and schedules–she studied English lit and this trip is her dream so she wants to see it all. But she must drag around this awkward bundle of muted dissatisfactions, parking him on a bench when necessary. Harrods proves to be a saving grace since the author is particularly ardent about retail–he’s a grocer back home in Chevy Chase, Md. His candor is initially disarming–some of his wisecracks speak to a secret rebellion lurking in Americans against forever worshipping at the altar of European Cultural Superiority. His effort to retain his good humor in the face of the indignities and absurdities of foreign travel fosters sympathy. Further, the book serves well as an apology, a collection of memories and a love letter to his wife. Ultimately, however, the humor seems a bit shopworn and sophomoric, as does the self-conscious introspection in later chapters. Thus the book seems best-suited to its target audience–the author’s loved one.
A kind marital gesture, but lacking universality.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-60145-704-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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