by Luc Sante ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 20, 2007
Whatever the topic and mood, these essays are a pleasure—and any work that name-checks the Nightcrawlers’ proto-punk classic...
Love letters to the old, weird New York and the old, weird cultural interests it sustained, by a grand centrifugal chronicler.
Take a piece that Village habitué Sante (The Factory of Facts, 1998, etc.) wrote for the New Yorker, a “Talk of the Town” feature about going out to grab a midnight snack in 1988 and running into a mini riot centered on Tompkins Square Park and its “latter-day Hooverville.” Sante disavows the published version for its introduced constructions (“well nigh,” “I decided to investigate”) and allows that Reaganville is more to the point, but it’s still a brisk report on a New York that has been truncheoned—no, fined—out of existence. Fined? Yes, writes Sante, for the gritty, noisy, beer-on-the-stoop New York of old was quashed during the Giuliani years, when the mayor ordered that tickets be written for every imaginable misdemeanor, including that byword for citizens’ rights, jaywalking. “New York’s transformation,” Sante avers, hinged on “the pedantic obsessiveness with which laws were combed to find a basis for extirpating all manifestations of street life, and the harshly punitive ways in which those sweeps were carried out.” Good-bye Tompkins Square squats, good-bye boarded-up buildings on Canal Street; the new New York wasn’t even tolerant of smoking, a habit, vice or way of being—take your pick—about which Sante writes a long but user-friendly semiotic analysis in which, among other things, he defends the old European custom of holding a ciggie between thumb and forefinger. (You can smoke more that way.) Alas—or hurrah, take your pick—Sante no longer smokes, and neither does the city. Other pieces touch deftly on matters of musical and cultural archaeology, from the origins of the blues to Allen Ginsberg’s turning up at Sante’s door to demand that the music be turned down.
Whatever the topic and mood, these essays are a pleasure—and any work that name-checks the Nightcrawlers’ proto-punk classic “The Little Black Egg” deserves the broadest possible readership.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-891241-53-6
Page Count: 300
Publisher: YETI/Verse Chorus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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