An entertaining bucket-list tale.
A quirky list of accomplishments in memoir form.
“Being an immigrant is akin to surviving a near-death experience—minus the excitement,” writes debut author Shifrin. “You constantly feel like you were given a second shot at life, and you want that shot to amount to something spectacular.” Originally from Russia, the author was turning 30 when she set out to write this book. She explains how her life was full of excitement, especially her 20s, which she calls “sloppy, sexy, sometimes sweet.” In preparation for her birthday, Shifrin established a list of all the things she needed to do before she hit 30. The book gathers the items on the list, each one with an accompanying story. Among the goals she set: take a writing class, live in a different country, land a late-night comedy set, fall in love (for real), buy real furniture, have a dramatic airport reunion, learn how to dress my body, etc. “I am living proof,” she writes, “that you can blossom from an awkward caterpillar into an awkward butterfly—a sharply dressed awkward butterfly who commands attention because she is comfortable in her clothing and looks like a consummate, trendy professional.” Shifrin continually tries to grasp why any said item on the list is integral to her development. When she moved to Taiwan for a “shitty job,” she quickly realized that even though she managed to leave America and live abroad, the abuse she endured at her work was not worth the limited opportunities her job offered her. The author also shuffled through a series of uncommitted relationships before she found the man with everything she looked for in a partner. Throughout, Shifrin gives readers a taste of what successful self-deprecation looks like; she constantly pokes fun at herself, analyzing the situations she put herself in and figuring out how they affected her journey.
An entertaining bucket-list tale.Pub Date: July 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-12971-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Wednesday Books
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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