Vignettes of a life recovered, not deep but authentic.
Former Parade editor in chief Kravitz makes amends and spends a year living connectedly.
Reflecting on his life after losing his job, the author was not pleased with what he found—a workaholic living in self-exile not just from his family but his greater life. He felt diminished because of his firing, and he felt guilty about the important things he dropped by the wayside: family and friends, a broad curiosity, an inclusive worldview. “As good as my life looked on paper,” he writes, “it was sorely lacking in the one area that puts flesh on meaning: human connectedness.” So the author devoted an entire year to tying up loose emotional ends. Despite being fearful and anxious, he reached out to reconnect with family, friends and acquaintances—a schizophrenic aunt, a high-school teacher, friends he has been concerned about, an old nemesis, people along the way he has made promises to that have gone begging—and found many pleasing nuggets of gold. Though genuine, Kravitz’s writing has a high pitch—not desperate, but somewhere between hopeful and eager to please. On the surface, his journeys are not particularly exciting; there are no swooning epiphanies, and the results don’t fit comfortably into a paint-by-numbers philosophy. Nonetheless, they are truthful, generous and worthwhile. Through his experiences, he found meaning, an acceptance of life’s absurdity and the insight that so much comes down to attitude and keeping the many threads of life thrumming.
Vignettes of a life recovered, not deep but authentic.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59691-675-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
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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