Although some pieces are slight, on the whole, reading Schwartz is like a pleasurable visit with a thoughtful and articulate...
A literary New Yorker shares her memories.
Novelist, poet and essayist Schwartz (Two-Part Inventions: A Novel, 2012, etc.) has gathered mostly previously published pieces on subjects ranging from childhood memories to taking an African drumming class to listening to Anthony Powell’s books on tape. Many are essays of self-discovery, efforts to dig “for the shards of…early delusions” and the sources of her easily incited anger, competitiveness and impatience. Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s and ’50s, Schwartz and her friends spent long Saturday afternoons at the movies, usually arriving in the middle of a feature. They watched, not certain about the plot until they saw it through at the next showing, leaving whenever they could say for certainty, “I think this is where we came in.” The reader undergoes a similar process in fitting together disparate “glimpses” into a full portrait. One essay focuses on the author’s cherished baby grand piano, an extravagant purchase by her parents, that she has moved wherever she has lived; another, on the quality of her parents’ marriage and its hidden intimacies. She reflects on the nature of friendship, on her youthful belief in humankind’s essential goodness, and on her knee-jerk response to blame someone or something for malevolence. “Blaming was a comfort,” she writes, “and comfort was high on our scale of values….If villains could be found to blame for everything, then evil could be localized and kept in check, like an epidemic.” The idea of evil permeates her recollection of a shattering visit to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners were held during apartheid. Two of the strongest essays focus on recent events: heart surgery to replace a valve, which generated months of severe depression; and her delicate parsing of love for a grandchild.
Although some pieces are slight, on the whole, reading Schwartz is like a pleasurable visit with a thoughtful and articulate friend.Pub Date: March 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61902-246-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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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