Lots of potential, but Palmer doesn’t deliver lyricism or insights to match the depths of her beloved dance. The wonderful...
Memoir that reads too much like a first draft about the author’s passion for the tango.
At 30, Palmer had done everything right. Educated at Cambridge, she worked for a blue-chip advertising firm and was off on a well-deserved vacation to Argentina. On her first night in Buenos Aires, a cousin took her to a tango club. She was hooked and spent the rest of her vacation taking tango lessons. Once home in New York, Palmer gave over her evenings to tango, dancing all over the city, searching for the perfect partner. Finally, she decided to quit her job and move to Buenos Aires to study tango full-time, with an eye toward becoming a professional dancer. But she wasn’t exactly leaping without a net; freaked that she might no longer be able to afford Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent, she convinced her father to subsidize her new life. The bulk of the tale chronicles Palmer’s three Argentine years, during which she lost weight, honed her craft and mooned over a few red-blooded hotties. In 2002, she left Argentina, going into “early retirement” from her short-lived dance career. There the story ends, leaving readers to wonder: What did Palmer do with herself post-Argentina? (The galley’s author bio tantalizingly suggests that in 2003 she returned to live in Buenos Aires, but the text does not go into this.) What lessons did she learn, and what should the reader learn? Her only gesture in this direction is the anodyne reflection that “tango had connected me with ME.” The whole, however, suffers from Palmer’s choice to structure her recollections as a diary: daily blow-by-blow follows daily blow-by-blow. The benefit of such a conceit is immediacy, but immediacy here comes at the expense of reflection and rumination.
Lots of potential, but Palmer doesn’t deliver lyricism or insights to match the depths of her beloved dance. The wonderful cover, though, a retro b&w photo oozing restrained eroticism, is sure to catch a browser’s eye.Pub Date: July 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-074292-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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