Wiener is anything but subtle in this gripping memoir of her turbulent upbringing in the New York City suburbs.
When Wiener loses her mother tragically at the age of 6, rather than attempting to help his young daughter grieve, Wiener’s inattentive father hires a surly and often extremely violent nanny to raise his children. Though he ensures his children are materially cared for, Wiener’s father is neglectful of his feisty daughter’s emotional needs as she matures. In an attempt to avoid day-to-day family life, he sends them on international trips at every opportunity. To her peers, Wiener’s life must have seemed privileged and exotic with summers in Europe and extravagant ski trips; however, Wiener reveals the lifelong psychological turmoil caused by growing up with little parental supervision or nurturing. At times, Wiener’s accounts of the physical abuse she suffered at the hands of a clearly unstable nanny are so vividly intense that it’s difficult to imagine how she endured. Wiener is continually unsuccessful at her attempts to win attention or support from her father (even as he witnesses firsthand an abusive episode by the nanny) and is relieved to enter boarding school in Vermont for high school. Boarding school, however, fails to provide the acceptance she has been seeking as she struggles to fit in with peers who come from more harmonious families and backgrounds. Eventually, Wiener accepts her isolation and with the help of recreational drugs and music, she bides her time making knowingly bad decisions until she can begin her post-graduation life. A skillful writer, Wiener artfully weaves the raw emotion of her childhood suffering with the cultural experience of the United States during the 1960s and ’70s. The music and political events of the time create a strong backdrop framing Wiener’s memories and feelings without overpowering the private nature of her story. Intimate and absorbing, Wiener’s tale successfully captures the feelings of a spirited yet lost young child growing up in a tumultuous period in American history.
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-1468011364
Page Count: 312
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
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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