An important writer with nothing new to say.
After traversing many different genres, from literary fiction (Dancing on Tisha B’Av, 1990) to academic mysteries (the Nick Hoffman series) and critical essays (Journeys and Arrivals, 1996), Raphael returns to nonfiction, drawing together 12 pieces about being a gay, Jewish writer.
The best essays are the first two, “Writing a Jewish Life” and “Okemos, Michigan.” Both were published in Journeys and Arrivals (“Writing” appeared under the title “To Be a Jew”), both have been widely anthologized, as is also true of several other pieces in the collection. Raphael fails to rework this disparate material into a seamless work of narrative nonfiction; indeed, he apparently couldn’t even be bothered to smooth out the transitions from essay to essay. In the first piece, for example, we read that one of his two stepsons is a Hillel director; a few pages later, the stepsons are in high school and college. In addition to such minor but jarring inconsistencies, the book’s other major problem is repetition. The fifth essay, “Writing Something Real,” rehashes the same themes as the title piece, and in many places, the two are repeated word for word. In both, Raphael explains that when he began to write, he avoided any mention of Judaism or the Holocaust. “My writing was as far away from myself as possible,” he tells us (twice), “and by that I mean as far away from my world, my own observations, my own truest knowledge.” Then, under the guidance of a college writing teacher, Raphael began to write a story that was honest and good. Now, in two essays, he exclaims, “I was terrified—I was alive.” To hear it once is great. Twice, it’s insulting. If we are going to take the time to read Raphael’s musings, can’t he take the time to revise and edit them?
An important writer with nothing new to say.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7867-1649-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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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