Gordon, a biographer of remarkable gifts (Eliot's New Life, 1988, etc.), turns her glass inward and examines the youth and maturity that she and her friends knew in Cape Town, Israel, New York, and Europe: a wide-ranging picaresque story bound together by childhood attachments never set aside. As a Jew growing up in South Africa in the 1950's, Gordon found herself doubly isolated, for the gentile community that surrounded her—and through which she could move only with the most practiced circumspection—was itself implacably sealed off from the black population that comprised the country's invisible majority. The effect was claustrophobic in the extreme and brought Gordon into alliance with schoolmates who suffered the contradictions as keenly as she did. Her narrative quickly focuses on three of these: Romy, Ellie, and Rose—all of whom died young, all of whom struggled against the social and imaginative constraints of their society. This is preeminently a story of exile—the actual exile of those (like Gordon) who left a world they could no longer endure, and the internal exile of those who tried to manage in a place that gave no scope to their desires—and it moves along that boundary between nostalgia and anger that is the exile's true domain. Good use is made of the diaries and letters of those concerned, and Gordon's voice is both intimate and precise throughout—especially as she describes her own difficulties in establishing an academic career. The tribute that she pays her friends is not entirely testimonial, however, for it sets forth the process by which Gordon grew into her own role—as an observer and interpreter of the lives of others. Elegant and strong: a subtle eye trained across years of memory. (Photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: June 29, 1992
ISBN: 0-393-03164-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1992
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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