A blithe, entertaining collection that will surely delight Binchy’s many fans.
Newspaper pieces by a prolific novelist and playwright.
Binchy (Chestnut Street, 2014, etc.) began her writing career as a journalist for the Irish Times, starting out as women’s editor, from 1968 to 1973, and continuing as columnist, feature writer and reporter based in the newspaper’s London office; in 1988, she resigned a full-time position but contributed regularly until her death in 2012. This selection of her work represents Binchy’s eclectic interests, infectious sense of humor and wry take on social change. In early pieces, she reflected on her experiences as a waitress and choosing underwear in Australia. She didn’t much like her body (she was always overweight) and compared herself to those more slender and well dressed. In 1976, she tried a week of self-improvement, following suggestions in a women’s magazine, but failed to transform herself into one of the “new brand of unreal woman.” Nevertheless, she was a successful writer, and she also gleefully reported on the doings of the royals. In 1973, she was at Westminster Abbey (“lit up like an operating theatre”) for the wedding of Princess Anne to Mark Phillips, where Grace Kelly was among the guests, “staring into space, looking like she always looked, kind of immaculate.” In 1981, her subjects were the fairy-tale couple, Charles and Diana. Binchy was not surprised when they separated in 1987: “[T]here were always aspects of the royal romance that spelled danger from the word go.” She noticed that Sarah Ferguson, “a bit pudgy for a princess,” was on a strict diet. Unable to attend, she watched Kate and William’s wedding on TV: “I miss the magic of the English losing all their reserve,” she noted ruefully. A bit intimidated by Samuel Beckett, she nevertheless produced an insightful portrait of her compatriot, with his “spikey hair” and “ludicrous energy.”
A blithe, entertaining collection that will surely delight Binchy’s many fans.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-35345-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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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