Entertaining chick lit that should resonate with women striving to have it all.
A follow-up to An Italian Affair (2001), combining jaunts around the globe with a journey into the author’s psyche.
More magazine contributing editor Fraser has a problem: how to fit her independent, travel-loving self into a settled, loving relationship—i.e., how to find a husband. The author opens with her vacation in Oaxaca with the married professor who figured prominently in her earlier memoir. Then the 40-year-old Fraser set off for Naples, Samoa, Provence, Peru, Rwanda and Mexico. In between she participated in an Outward Bound venture in Canyonlands National Park, a college reunion in Connecticut, a meditation retreat in Marin County and tango lessons in Buenos Aires. Assignments writing about food enabled her to wine and dine in style, and her descriptions of meals are mouthwatering. Fraser is also perceptive about her surroundings and frank about her desires; her trials and tribulations with men are alternately funny and sad, and seemingly never-ending. The trip to Samoa provided a kind of turning point, when a sexual assault on the beach exposed her to her own vulnerability, shook her self-confidence and dampened her eagerness to travel. In the final chapters the author is 47 and still single, and she has built a home in the town in Mexico where she vacationed as a child. Even though she hasn’t found a husband, Fraser seems to have achieved a kind of balance that gives her story a calm and upbeat ending.
Entertaining chick lit that should resonate with women striving to have it all.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-45063-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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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