Novelist Gould’s (No Brakes, 1997; Medusa’s Gift, 1991) memoir vividly captures both her joyless childhood as daughter of an aloof fashion-designer mother and the old New York that shaped them both. Jo Copeland, though not now a household name, was once a star of the American fashion industry. In a career spanning the years from the 1920s to the 1960s, Copeland rose from fabric cutter to the designer who brought glamour to American fashion. But while Copeland’s designs were romantic, her outlook was not. Her attitude, described with characteristic acerbic wit by Gould, was: “Sexy was wonderful. Sex wasn’t.” In her daughter’s honest and cool analysis (which the reader grows to share), Copeland emerges as a woman for whom clothes were a refuge from the facts of life. Given that Copeland pursued her career at the cost of her marriage (her husband felt he couldn’t “possess” her and walked out) and that her own mother died in childbirth, Copeland’s extreme withdrawal from family life is, if not pardonable, then at least comprehensible. While Gould infuses Mommy Dressing with bitter memories of a painful family life, her memoir lives up to its claim to be a love story. It portrays a child obsessed with a fear of abandonment and a painful desire for love and affection, realistic responses in light of the noticeable lack of warmth conveyed in the scenes of daily life depicting solitary dinners, stony silences, fiery outbursts, and intimate betrayals. The reader perceives both Gould’s struggle to bridge the gap of silence that long separated her from her mother and her painful awareness of that impossibility, along with a mature acceptance of her mother’s choices. Breezily readable yet deeply painful, Gould’s memoir captures the glamour, the mystery, and the pain of her mother’s personal and private life.(24 b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-49053-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
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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