Should leave most readers standing on their heads with admiration.
Finding herself born to be the stable center of a vastly dysfunctional family, Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter keeps her balance with yoga.
Each chapter of Hemingway’s memoir opens with a yoga posture, which has an uplifting effect; readers get the feeling that yoga just might be good for one’s well-being. Mariel’s “heartbreakingly lovely” widowed mother, Byra, married Jack Hemingway after an intense four-year courtship, even though she didn’t love him. Mariel was born four months after grandfather’s suicide in 1961. Lack of love and his own leanings soon left Jack disaffected from his family and paying it little attention while Byra griped about housework and raged at him. Mariel’s eldest sister Muffet was mentally ill; school-skipping, star-crossed middle sister Margaux partied wildly, left home, became a model, and starred in the movie Lipstick, recruiting 13-year-old Mariel for a supporting role. Just as she discovered her talent for acting, Mariel was stuck with the grim task of nursing her cancer-stricken mother. “I came to believe the only way I could avoid the same fate was through controlling what I put into my own mouth,” she writes; she flung herself into vegetarianism, macrobiotics, and other diets until her thyroid gland shut down. She also consulted a succession of “spiritual wacks, psychics, astrologers, and holistic doctors.” At 16, a total innocent, she played a sexually astute teenager in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, then flew off to the Cannes Film Festival with Dad. Still a virgin, she depicted a lesbian track-star champion in Personal Best and later got breast implants to portray murdered Playboy playmate Dorothy Stratten in Star 80. The memoir’s last few chapters chant a litany of woe: Margaux dies of an epileptic seizure a coroner calls suicide, Dad goes into a brain-dead coma while talking with Mariel in the hospital, husband Steve survives cancer and near-drowning. Time to meditate.
Should leave most readers standing on their heads with admiration.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-3807-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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
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