Charmingly idiosyncratic and peripatetic.
A veteran author of novels, poetry and essays examines her deep ambivalence about the value of travel—and connects it to the publication of her most recent novel (The Writing on the Wall, 2005).
Schwartz’s account begins in confusion in the early morning darkness in a hotel on the Greek island of Naxos. It ends with a sort of epiphany—a way to complete a story begun decades ago as a seventh grader, which became a novel about twins that she had returned to but abandoned on earlier occasions. In between, Schwartz moves about like a nervous traveler with an uncertain but engaging itinerary. So swiftly and gracefully do her paragraphs flow into one another that we are unbothered by jumping around to Jamaica, Rome, St. Louis, the Catskills, Hawaii and a fancy Boston hotel room plagued by a mouse. Schwartz says she’s never liked to travel—despite her girlhood fantasies about upscale hotels with alacritous bellhops—because she doesn’t like to feel ignorant, fearful or disrupted; she prefers familiar surroundings and the voyages in her mind. She confesses that she is often bored by the travel accounts of others, and suspects she’s not alone. (In some places she forgets this principle with her own overlong anecdotes.) Throughout she alludes to—and quotes generously from—the Tao te Ching and the travel writings of Italo Calvino, W.G. Sebald, Frigyes Karinthy and many others. She writes affectingly about the loss of her father, and wonders if he were somehow related to look-alike Ariel Sharon. She recalls impecunious grad-school days and—most alarmingly—seeing a severed human hand in the Jamaican surf. Looming over all…9/11.
Charmingly idiosyncratic and peripatetic.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58243-428-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
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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