First-time author Aldrich has certainly penned an original work, but it’s one that tries too hard to be worldly and jarring. Aldrich sacrifices autobiography for agenda, making the reader question her credibility at times (as at the start, when she claims she watched her family interact from her —unborn position—). The key figure in the narrative is Aldrich’s mother, an admittedly weird woman whose obsession with cleanliness extended to rarely cooking meals and refusing to open any windows. The reader feels confused about whether she has obsessive-compulsive disorder or whether her cleaning craze is simply an extension of the hyperfemininity she tries to instill in her daughters. From her mother Aldrich learned to pick at her food and bury her grief for her drowned older sister, who is scarcely mentioned in the book after her death is rather dispassionately discussed. As a rebellious adolescent, Aldrich was dispatched to a second-tier private school, where her only solace came in riding her horse, Alert. (The chapter on horseback riding is the most heartfelt segment of the book.) In college, she engaged in two disastrous affairs with married professors, one of whom divorced his wife and briefly married Aldrich. In the end, though, a visit to a sage fortune-teller helped her to see that she had some power to reinvent the patterns of her life. Now remarried and with a daughter, Aldrich has taken up gardening and revels in prolonging any really dirty task outdoors. When her pristine childhood dolls were sent for her own daughter’s use, Aldrich buried them all in the garden, stuffing their painted ruby lips with black earth. Too clever by half, but not personal enough to be whole, despite its encouraging conclusion.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-393-02748-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
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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