Bumpy, but both snappy and deeply felt.
Growing up heavy, Jewish and effeminate on the Upper East Side.
Rothschild’s dialogue is so sassy, his characters’ exits so perfectly executed, that the average reader might be forgiven for assuming his sparklingly witty debut memoir was the draft script for a new HBO series on dysfunctional family life. His mother, a flighty sort given to jetting about overseas and marrying various aristocratic playboys, handed off infant Matthew to her richer-than-Croesus parents. Although practically the only child of noticeably Semitic persuasion in his exclusive corner of Manhattan, he was blessed with a glamorous, globetrotting, bellowing dragon of a grandmother, the book’s most intriguing character. Easily overpowering everyone (including his genteel Old World grandfather), she was always doing things like running off to Asia to shoot photographs for six months or storming into his grade school to curse out a teacher who tried to pressure him into being photographed in front of a Christmas tree. (“I’ll drop-kick his Santa-loving ass from here to Macy’s,” she declared.) Heavy-set and with a predilection for dressing in women’s clothes, Rothschild wasn’t exactly the most popular kid, but his relatively normal adolescent issues get a Dynasty-like kick from his mother’s neglect and the stink of vast wealth enveloping the whole family. Feeling like “the hangnail on the manicured hand of the Upper East Side,” he got through by playing extreme make-believe and gossiping up a storm. He eventually achieved some stability by moving out of Manhattan, but once away from the family circus, Rothschild’s narrative shows some slackness. (His coming to terms with his homosexuality seems particularly perfunctory.) A section about the author discovering his Jewish faith at college, then haranguing his mother for her lack of belief, is ugly enough to dissipate some of the sympathy prompted by his travails in earlier chapters.
Bumpy, but both snappy and deeply felt.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-40542-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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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