Unsettling and absorbing.
Multilayered memoir chronicles a young woman’s growth into adulthood, probing the ethics of adultery and portraying an enviable, mature marriage.
Darling was a fledgling Washington Post reporter when she met acclaimed journalist Lee Lescaze. He was married, but that didn’t stop the two from beginning a torrid affair. When Lescaze’s wife found a card she had sent him, Darling wavered a little bit, wanting to tell her lover, “I am a thirty-year-old girl with the moral depth of a dragonfly, and you would be crazy to do anything that connected your happiness to mine.” Nonetheless, he got a divorce and moved in with her. The familiar staples (verging on clichés) of the affair-and-remarriage genre are here: Before Lescaze left his wife, Darling wondered what it would be like to date someone with whom she could be seen in public; afterwards, she desperately tried to get his kids to like her. The real strength of this account is its depiction of the lovers’ eventual marriage. Together, they struggled with the death of Lescaze’s son, then with his own fatal cancer. The most insightful chapter details their first year of marriage. With tender pathos, Darling describes becoming “really married,” the process through which “our initial idea of romance yielded reluctantly to the reality of daily life.” Since their relationship had begun as an affair, this transition from the romantic to the quotidian was especially fraught; Darling could no longer define herself as the exciting vixen who would rescue Lescaze from the dull drudgery of his first marriage. Anyone who is married will laugh with Darling as she describes the disappointment she felt when her new hubby gave her towels for Valentine’s Day, and underline her many insights into the “cycles [of] domestic life.”
Unsettling and absorbing.Pub Date: March 27, 2007
ISBN: 0-385-33606-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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