The congeries of stories has its interest, but Lorenz is an indifferent writer. One hopes that the movie version, to which...
“I was stupid and haughty then, a rebel. I sleep alone now”: Lorenz delivers a tale of espionage and deceit, told with rueful candor.
“I didn’t have a happy childhood,” writes the author early on in this update of her 1993 book. That much is already obvious, for a couple of pages earlier, we find her rescued from a German concentration camp, weighing scarcely 45 pounds and unable to stand on her own, one of just a handful of survivors. A year later, an American soldier raped her. Moving with her mother to the U.S. but already certain that she was destined to live a lonely life, Lorenz traveled to Cuba on a ship in the German line where her father was a captain; among her shipmates were a couple of kids from Bremerhaven who would later sneak a tiger cub aboard and who would grow up to become Las Vegas magicians Siegfried and Roy. Not yet 20, Lorenz became one of Fidel Castro’s lovers, his alemanita, “little German girl.” The relationship did not last long, and apparently it was a didactic one, inasmuch as Castro “loved to explain his ideas about agrarian reform” and strike heroic poses. He was capable of flying off the handle, though, outraged when Dwight Eisenhower dispatched Richard Nixon to meet with him so that Eisenhower could sneak in a round of golf. The relationship ended with a pregnant Lorenz suffering a mysterious blackout and waking up without child, treated by a cardiologist and not a gynecologist whom Castro then ordered to be shot—or, at any rate, so she believes. Recruited to assassinate Castro, who blustered, “no one can kill me. No one. Ever,” she took up with Venezuelan strongman Marcos Pérez, got involved with mobsters (including the one who recruited her to kill Castro), and wound up hearing tales about the assassination of JFK and the Watergate burglary.
The congeries of stories has its interest, but Lorenz is an indifferent writer. One hopes that the movie version, to which this ties in, has a little more zing.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-514-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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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