Often heavy-handed, but also tender and heartfelt.
Investigative reporter Lagnado (The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World, 2007, etc.) compares her mother's upbringing in Cairo to her own coming-of-age in Brooklyn.
The author is a gifted storyteller who spins ordinary family experiences into enchanting fairy tales, complete with magical backdrops (the streets of Cairo, New York, and Montreal), nasty villains and dashing heroes. For the most part, Lagnado's storybook style is both inviting and endearing. By the end, though, it wears thin. Many human experiences are too complex to be reduced to happy or sad, and Lagnado's determination to cast everyone she encounters as either friend or foe grows irksome. Her descriptions of places, particularly in Egypt, are vivid and evocative, but her perspective is simplistic and her adjectives are limited; people who intimidate her are “formidable,” while those she likes are “friendly” and “down-to-earth.” Often her tone is unsuited to the situation or event she is describing, rendering the narrative unintentionally funny. Her decision about whether to buy Pappagallo shoes before beginning college at Vassar and whether to withdraw from Vassar sound, in her telling, equally wrenching. Although she and her family suffered genuine tragedy, Lagnado writes as if every choice, no matter how trivial or mundane, were difficult, painful and heavy with significance. It's a delight to read about the author as an impish, spirited child; her eventual transformation into a somber, self-serious adult is an unwelcome surprise. A catatonic stroke victim by the last chapter, Lagnado’s brave and brilliant mother emerges as the book's true hero.
Often heavy-handed, but also tender and heartfelt.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-180367-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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