Another well-written but tiresomely narcissistic voyage of self-discovery.
Finding it difficult to commit, a journalist in her 30s spends a summer driving down the East Coast while she recalls past loves and ponders present options.
Wright is an accomplished writer (New York Times, Baltimore Sun, etc.), and she vividly describes her encounters with colorful characters en route. But the details of her personal relationships—the sex, her herpes infection, the men themselves—often make for queasy reading. Attending graduate journalism courses in New York, she feels torn between old love Stuart, a veterinarian whose dog Brando briefly accompanies her, and new swain Peter, a writer. Panicked by her inability to choose, she decides to travel alone for the summer. Wright hopes that by revisiting her past and reflecting on her present situation she will reach a decision. Beginning in Maine, she moves to New Hampshire and there decides to include in her itinerary places like Nantucket, where she had a summer fling with a waiter, and Greenwich, Connecticut, where she spent weekends with her wealthy beau Dodge, a Wall Street banker. She meets people like recently divorced Carl, who asks her where love goes when a marriage breaks down, and South Carolina fisherman Troy, who takes her shrimping off Edisto Island. She also recalls the other men in her life. While working in Colorado, Wright had three suitors vying for her affections. Describing her grandparents’ marriage as well as that of her parents, she wonders whether her inability to commit is similar to her father’s debilitating claustrophobia. But finally, while swimming in Key West, she has a defining epiphany that makes the whole adventure worthwhile. It all seems strained, and sometimes as irrelevant as her grandfather’s comments on love and marriage that preface each section.
Another well-written but tiresomely narcissistic voyage of self-discovery.Pub Date: June 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-7679-1003-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
