Filled with lots of girl-talk, this memoir will appeal to readers who can’t get enough of the beginning, middle and sweet...
A single, middle-aged, Midwestern author and magazine writer’s life is transformed after being set up with a commitment-phobic man from New York.
Yellin (Such a Lovely Couple, 1991) recounts the trials of long-distance romance, becoming a stepmother and creating a life on the East Coast. Five years after a marriage that ended in heartbreak, the author finally acknowledged her loneliness. She was ready for romance, but she didn’t want to experience the hassles that accompany dating. “I longed to skip the getting-to-know-you part and immediately jump to the rent-a-movie-and-order-in–some-Chinese part,” she writes.” Her relationship with Randy began with a long-distance phone call, progressed to longer calls and then trips to New York. After two years of dating, Yellin finally met his children. The couple married, and the author began the difficult adjustment to the unfamiliar terrain of her family and city. “When I wasn’t trying to navigate the children,” she writes, “I was trying to navigate New York.” The majority of the narrative consists of Yellin’s humorous accounts of deciphering the subway system; understanding the differences between being Jewish and from Chicago and being Jewish and from New York; and becoming a good stepmother. The author also candidly describes the hothouse environment of her new job overseeing the advertising for a TV network. “The network was packed with women in their forties all going through their menopausal worst on the same day: throwing tantrums, screaming in the hallways, slamming doors,” she writes. “I felt like I was in a women’s prison movie except instead of a cell I had a corner office.” Eventually, the author began to feel at home, and she made peace with her stepchildren.
Filled with lots of girl-talk, this memoir will appeal to readers who can’t get enough of the beginning, middle and sweet endings of love stories.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2589-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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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