Rich in source material and historical detail, the book suffers from the author's pulpy prose style. Still, worth reading...
Faderman (Naked in the Promised Land, 2004, etc.) reconstructs her mother's experiences as a Jewish immigrant in 1930s New York.
The author has a knack for tracking down details that bring a story to life, and her descriptions of her mother Mary's journey from a Latvian shtetl to the garment factories and Bronx apartment buildings of 1930s New York are vivid and memorable—as are her descriptions of the dangers faced by the relatives Mary left behind in Latvia. Unfortunately, the fascinating raw material falters under the weight of Faderman’s ponderous prose. The author’s overreliance on heavy-handed foreshadowing saps the narrative energy, and the constant invoking of her mother's "destiny" feels contrived. Faderman's simultaneous resentment of the father who treated her mother badly and gratitude for the man who helped make her is a tension worth exploring; however, the author merely (and repetitiously) asserts it. Faderman's scrupulousness in constructing a faithful historical narrative is admirable, but her writing is overheated and cliché-ridden: moments lead “inexorably” to “what she would pay for to her last rattling breath,” the spread of the “cancer” of fascism is “inexorable,” Americans turn “a blind eye and a deaf ear” to Hitler's aggressions, etc.
Rich in source material and historical detail, the book suffers from the author's pulpy prose style. Still, worth reading for those interested in the lives of Jewish immigrants in New York and the spread of fascism in Eastern Europe in the 1930s.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8070-5052-1
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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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