A witty, entertaining memoir offering guidance on the precarious integration of life and love.
A relationship columnist fuses sage advice with dispatches from her own personal life.
After getting unceremoniously dumped by her boyfriend, Boston Globe entertainment reporter Goldstein (The Singles, 2012, etc.) jumped at the opportunity to pen her own recurring online feature devoted to the local Massachusetts dating scene. “Love Letters" debuted in 2009, and the author shares the inaugural letter from a frustrated woman concerned about her boyfriend’s commitment potential. The column came equipped with a “robust comments section” in which readers shared their reactions, and which Goldstein liberally shares throughout. Featuring a lively mix of experiences in love, dating, intimacy, and other topics, the column became an immediate sensation, and the author’s inbox crested with pleas for counsel. Despite a lack of psychology acumen, she parlayed her talent for dispensing rational advice to family and friends directly into her writing. This made her accessible, shrewd, and relatable, and her real-world advice leveled the playing field with the everyday people who read (and responded to) the column. Goldstein is at her strongest when tackling such issues as platonic workplace relationships, managing the sting of rejection, uneven sex drives in a relationship, and risky interoffice romances; all of these are issues the author has encountered and overcome. As the years progressed, her reading audience and popularity ballooned along with her confidence level in dispensing advice. She tackles the ethics of relationship snooping, age-related woes of the heart, and pornography use while periodically dealing with the trolls in the comments section. Goldstein’s hybrid of guidance and confessional turns poignant when she discusses her mother’s cancer diagnosis and she is relegated to finding “extreme escapism” tactics and time with a caregiver support group to balance the emotional toll of the situation. Charming chapters on sex and her reluctant re-entry into the dating world strike another harmonious balance of breezy and informative.
A witty, entertaining memoir offering guidance on the precarious integration of life and love.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4555-4377-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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