A touching, delicious, compulsively readable account of life after love.
A former Forbes writer drolly details the emotional fallout after her fiancé admitted he was gay.
Not wanting to deceive her any longer, 36-year-old Aaron sat Blakeley down and tearfully admitted he’d been questioning his sexuality for the past two years. Initially amused but eventually shell-shocked, the author shifted into reconnaissance mode, wracking her frenzied brain to recall any signs of Aaron’s homosexuality that she may have missed. Blakeley grasped the brunt of her ex’s emotional and physical duplicity when she found anonymous personal-ad correspondence and gay-porn videos on his personal computer, a discovery which plunged her into “an eerie twilight world populated by those whom life had kicked in the teeth.” An attractive, newly single, 36-year-old woman in Manhattan, Blakeley was prone to crying on the shoulder of her gay friend Tyler and to fits of anger, insecurity and frustration. In attempts to recalibrate herself to single life, she hit the clubs, telling herself to enjoy and not overthink innocent, intermittent dalliances with guys like sensual, soft-voiced Rahil, sexy Pakistani Adi and a few ill-suited men from her profile on Match.com—all while stoking an apprehensive friendship with Aaron (“I love him, and I resent him”). The author was smart to steer clear of emotional ties until she met selfish, 30-something banker James, and all bets (and clothes) were off. Throughout the 320 melodramatic days chronicled in this amiable memoir, Blakeley remains a charming, witty narrator, squandering no opportunity to inject hip, biting sarcasm and hilarious insight into her adventures. Still, a bittersweet aftertaste lingers, reminding readers of “the crippling awareness that you could never know anyone…[that] the person you know best could be the person you know least.”
A touching, delicious, compulsively readable account of life after love.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8065-3330-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
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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