If only our response to the pandemic on other fronts could have been as speedy and potent as this literary one.
The difficult spring of 2020, as chronicled by scholars, poets, essayists, and others in the Yale Review.
As we approach the one-year anniversary of the beginning of the pandemic, this collection, put together from the March, April, and May issues of the Review’s "Pandemic Files," seeks to "encapsulate both the inexpressible grief of our moment and the possibility for change and reflection held within it." Editor O'Rourke assembles the work of 36 authors from a wide range of backgrounds. The contributors write not just about the lockdown, but also medicine and epidemiology, the Black Lives Matter protests, the border wall, the contemporary relevance of Thucydides and Boccaccio's Decameron, and how "modern North American history begins with an infectious disease crisis.” Russell Morse, a New York public defender, movingly documents his vigorous but largely doomed attempts to help "the most vulnerable among us," the incarcerated and the homeless. Among the poets represented are Victoria Chang, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Monica Ferrell, and their emotional firepower is matched by a number of strong personal essays. Briallen Hopper, a creative writing professor who lives in Elmhurst, Queens, "a global COVID-19 epicenter" where "the sirens never stop,” mourns the terrible impact of the virus on her blue-collar neighborhood. Rachel Jamison Webster remembers her aunt, who "arrived in my life exactly when I needed her, when I was afraid I would never escape my conventional upbringing." Is it the right time to read this book? One answer is given by recent Yale graduate Meghana Mysore, quoting Yiyun Li—"Rarely does a story start where we wish it had, or end where we wish it would"—and adding her own pertinent thought: "But somewhere in all the chaos is a story, if we are given time to see it." Other contributors include Katie Kitamura, John Fabian Witt, Nell Freudenberger, Randi Hutter Epstein, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips.
If only our response to the pandemic on other fronts could have been as speedy and potent as this literary one.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25735-9
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.
Enduring the unthinkable.
This memoir—the first by an Israeli taken captive by Hamas on October 7, 2023—chronicles the 491 days the author was held in Gaza. Confined to tunnels beneath war-ravaged streets, Sharabi was beaten, humiliated, and underfed. When he was finally released in February, he learned that Hamas had murdered his wife and two daughters. In the face of scarcely imaginable loss, Sharabi has crafted a potent record of his will to survive. The author’s ordeal began when Hamas fighters dragged him from his home, in a kibbutz near Gaza. Alongside others, he was held for months at a time in filthy subterranean spaces. He catalogs sensory assaults with novelistic specificity. Iron shackles grip his ankles. Broken toilets produce an “unbearable stink,” and “tiny white worms” swarm his toothbrush. He gets one meal a day, his “belly caving inward.” Desperate for more food, he stages a fainting episode, using a shaving razor to “slice a deep gash into my eyebrow.” Captors share their sweets while celebrating an Iranian missile attack on Israel. He and other hostages sneak fleeting pleasures, finding and downing an orange soda before a guard can seize it. Several times, Sharabi—51 when he was kidnapped—gives bracing pep talks to younger compatriots. The captives learn to control what they can, trading family stories and “lift[ing] water bottles like dumbbells.” Remarkably, there’s some levity. He and fellow hostages nickname one Hamas guard “the Triangle” because he’s shaped like a SpongeBob SquarePants character. The book’s closing scenes, in which Sharabi tries to console other hostages’ families while learning the worst about his own, are heartbreaking. His captors “are still human beings,” writes Sharabi, bravely modeling the forbearance that our leaders often lack.
A dauntless, moving account of a kidnapping and the horrors that followed.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780063489790
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper Influence/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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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