An inevitably personal response that serves to remind again how the 9/11 attacks affected the lives of countless ordinary...
In another poignant addition to the literary legacy of 9/11, a young widow recalls for their infant daughter the father she will never know.
Alternating an account of her experiences after husband Jeremy died on Flight 93 with memories of their first meeting and subsequent relationship, Glick has produced an act of preservation as much as of mourning. Determined that their daughter Emmy, three months old when he died, should know her father, Glick recollects all the details she hopes will give a sense of Jeremy: his love of sport, especially judo, the way he’d sneak out of the house to see his friends, their roller-coaster relationship, and his success as a salesman. She recalls the day in 1984 when she first sat next to him in ninth-grade biology. She disliked Jeremy’s enormous Afro, which she thought made him look like a cannibal, but she enjoyed his sense of humor, and the two soon became friends. They sometimes dated, sometimes broke up for long periods of time, especially in college, but they always stayed in touch, either personally or through Jeremy’s many friends. They married in 1996 and three years later bought a lakeside home in New Jersey, where Glick, who had experienced a number of miscarriages, finally became pregnant with Emmy. As she records their past, she also describes the period following 9/11: her grief; the stress of dealing with the media; interviews with FBI; her several visits to the White House, where she met with President Bush. Therapy sessions joined her with other women who had lost loved ones that day, but nothing really prepared her for such harrowing experiences as receiving Jeremy’s few remains (teeth and a datebook) and listening to the tape from the Flight 93 black box.
An inevitably personal response that serves to remind again how the 9/11 attacks affected the lives of countless ordinary families.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-31921-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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