The boldface names give the book curb appeal, but this memoir’s hidden strength is its testimony to the beauty and...
Portrait of the enduring romance between Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Franks and long-serving New York County district attorney Robert Morgenthau.
Franks (My Father’s Secret War: A Memoir, 2007, etc.) looks back on her life and marriage to the much older Morgenthau with focus and candor, and she endeavors to “talk about the personal life that he has kept so private during his forty-five years as a public figure.” The author first depicts their mutual attraction against the tumult of 1970s New York City, which had driven the rebellious, feminist Franks to become a Times reporter: “I ended up deciding not to join the Weathermen and to write its story instead.” Yet, she scandalized her fellow leftists in 1976 by dating Morgenthau, a low-key yet powerful establishment scion (his father was a prominent Franklin Roosevelt adviser, and he’d served heroically in World War II, as had her own father) who enjoyed public approval and a reputation for rectitude during a chaotic, high-crime era. Once they married, Franks contended with Morgenthau’s difficulty in moving past his revered first wife, who died following a painful bout with cancer. She also struggled to move her writing forward despite the duties of a “society wife,” though she continued to pursue prominent projects, such as her controversial interview with Hillary Clinton following the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Franks’ chiseled prose demonstrates her chops as a veteran journalist, although the narrative slackens somewhat as the couple settles into domesticity and Morgenthau continues to score high-profile legal victories. They encountered rough patches and periods of quarrel but also successfully raised two children in addition to Morgenthau’s earlier family. Ultimately, they always returned to a state of marital grace: “I rather envied Bob’s ability to start every moment anew, as though the present were the future and the past never happened.”
The boldface names give the book curb appeal, but this memoir’s hidden strength is its testimony to the beauty and difficulty of a long-term marriage.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-28080-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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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