Plaut depicts her checkered, un-maidenly career with innate craft, frequently employing a hackie’s pungent vocabulary.
Middle-class college girl from suburbia sees life as a bit humdrum until she leaves her office job for the driver’s seat of a yellow cab.
In a text born of her blog, Plaut explains how she undertook to find herself by driving a taxi around New York City. Before being licensed to join the other 13,000 or so hacks, she had to attend taxi school. Where could South 11th and Berry Street possibly be? She soon learned the geography of Gotham, calling her parents just once for directions. At the garage where she leased a car each shift, she found camaraderie even as she banished the guys from the ladies room. Enclosed nightly in a smelly, battered vehicle with 30 or 40 strangers, she met lawyers and bankers, hipsters, yuppies, druggies and crazies, big tippers and fare beaters, backseat-driving louts and backseat-lubricious lovers. She acquired a few valuable pieces of wisdom. About route choices: Don’t get lost. About rest stopping: Don’t hold it in. About road rage: Don’t engage. Never argue with cops, either; they don’t like cabbies. The worst drivers on the road? They were in “white Mercedes SUVs with Jersey plates.” And there was always the possibility of driving into (or picking up) some serious violence. After almost two years, the hip but beleaguered nice Jewish gay girl started to have nightmares. She still has her license, but drives less now that she’s writing.
Plaut depicts her checkered, un-maidenly career with innate craft, frequently employing a hackie’s pungent vocabulary.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7739-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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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