As Gloria Steinem might say, this is what 80 looks like: a pale paean to flowers, food, and friends. Sarton's novel As We Are Now (1973)—a brilliant and moving fictional journal of life (and death) in a nursing home—makes this memoir pallid by comparison, and the problems of inconsequential, lackluster writing that appeared in Sarton's earlier journals of infirmity and old age (Endgame, 1992, etc.) crop up here as well. The life cycle of the flowers on the author's Maine estate are documented in detail; lunches, dinners, and flower arrangements provided by friends and ``fans'' are described exquisitely; pain (apparently caused by intestinal blockage), medication, and visits to the holistic doctor who monitors the author's diet are carefully depicted. Sarton's joy in her cat, her many visitors (especially friend Susan, who frequently comes bearing roses but who isn't otherwise identified), and her fan mail is matched by the burden she feels in answering letters, letting in her cat at 1:00 a.m. (and sometimes again at 4:00 a.m.), and checking the weather. But the last handful of entries here reminds us of Sarton the well- regarded novelist and poet. In them, apparently in response to improving health, she switches from dictating into a tape recorder to writing the day's events, and from simple sentences in which ``wonderful'' is the adjective du jour to a richer, more thoughtful prose style. This is her last journal, Sarton says; her next project will be a novella based on a recent trip to England. Sarton's energy and focus are inspiring—but readers looking for analysis or fresh literary gossip won't find them here. (Photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 9, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03529-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1993
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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