While references to sexual acts, male anatomy, and drug use may put off some readers, most who either recall or are curious...
Fundraising adviser Cove recalls with humor and understanding a pivotal year in the life of his family.
The first-time author was 12 in 1978 when his family moved from Manhattan to Salem, Massachusetts. This was his eighth move, so he quickly settled into the routine of new friends, potential girlfriends, bar mitzvah preparation, the practice of storing undelivered newspapers from his paper route in his closet, and living in a dilapidated if historic house from whose sloping roof he could see the ocean and smoke whatever substances he could procure. Into this scene arrived one of his father’s old California hippie friends, Howie, and his new wife, Carly. Howie, at first planning to stay just a couple weeks, hung around for months and, at a big Thanksgiving dinner, made an impression by hauling out a new issue of Playgirl in which he was the centerfold. Howie decided that his next step up the career ladder would be to earn the title of Playgirl’s “Man of the Year,” and he enlisted Cove to be his campaign organizer in reaching out to the reluctant residents of Salem. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the marriage of the author’s parents was quietly, and then not so quietly, unraveling. Cove has a light touch and an eye for regional and temporal detail, and if some of his anecdotes appear to have been exaggerated for dramatic effect, he never comes across as self-aggrandizing. His pains and pleasures have been tempered by the decades, and the book clearly conveys both his disappointment with his parents at the time and the ways the years since have shaped his forgiveness and appreciation of them.
While references to sexual acts, male anatomy, and drug use may put off some readers, most who either recall or are curious about this free-loving period of history will find themselves satisfied by Cove’s re-creation of his journey out of boyhood.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12396-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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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