Chick-lit-alicious.
In this fun but also moving debut memoir, Gasbarre tells the story of how she “boomeranged” back home to help care for the newly widowed grandmother who unexpectedly became her “ideal relationship guru.”
The two women seemed polar opposites. “Grandma Glo” had married young and never finished college, while Gasbarre had graduated with a master’s degree, lived in Europe, and “spent all of [her] twenties questing and introspecting to understand where [she] fit in the world.” But for all the adventure she had experienced, the author, unlike her grandmother, had only known unfulfilling, short-lived romances with men. Yet the two women found common ground in one important way—they both shared an “equally intense affinity for the first generation all-American alpha male.” Their bond deepened as Gasbarre shared the details of the two relationships that occupied her attention during her stay at her parents’ house: one with an immature collegiate six years her junior and the other with a shy, gentle cosmetic surgeon who showed her what it was like to be courted. Grandma Glo in turn provided glimpses into a bygone era when men cherished their women and women stood steadfastly by their men. Gasbarre uses each “lesson” she learned from her Grandmother—such as learning to listen, being prepared to forgive and loving by existing—as the title of each chapter, and each chapter as a kind of chronological “illustration” of how she came to terms with that lesson. Her depiction of how two “fiery, independent women” bonded across generations is heartwarming without being saccharine. The author’s treatment of the central conflict that drives the book—the quintessentially modern female quandary of finding lasting love while staying true to personal ambitions—comes across with an integrity and veracity women readers will undoubtedly appreciate.
Chick-lit-alicious.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-199739-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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