An affecting investigation of loss, sorrow, and the search for meaning.
Memoir of a young life punctuated by devastating grief.
“I am extraordinarily privileged in nearly every way, but what I’m most grateful for now is my parents’ belief, passed down like any other inheritance, that there’s more beauty in the world than horror.” So writes Braitman, director of the Writing and Storytelling Program at the Stanford University School of Medicine and author of Animal Madness, who experienced plenty of horror in childhood, as her father, a surgeon who wanted more than anything else to be an avocado rancher, found himself stricken with an aggressive bone cancer. It was a “death sentence in 1981,” when “chemotherapy for bone cancer was new and toxic, still in the experimental stage.” Though he outlived the odds, he eventually succumbed. Braitman writes movingly about how he kept appearing in often wonderful ways in her life, such as the bespoke stitches he left as his signature in the hearts of his patients. “The book of the heart is immortal,” she writes. “Or at least it’s longer than we think.” His death, like all deaths, was an occasion for lack of closure, and it did not help much in preparing the author for the deaths of other loved ones. There are a few unsatisfying turns as Braitman grasps for direction and love against the knowledge, hardly secret, that everyone we know will die and everything we know will disappear, but eventually she resolves herself, mostly, to that truth. Some moments are a little forced, but, after a spell of world traveling, earning a doctorate, racking up honors and achievements, and, most of all, enduring the ordinary griefs of life, the author has prevailed. One of her closing realizations is worth the cover price alone: “There is no such thing as happily ever after. There is only happily sad or sadly happy.”
An affecting investigation of loss, sorrow, and the search for meaning.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781501158506
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
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