A well-told story of the raw ingredients of growing up, free of bluster but full of brio. (Eight-page photo insert, not seen)
A valentine to summer camp from recently deposed Disney CEO Eisner, who makes it clear why the camp reverberates for him to this very day.
Camp Keewaydin sits snuggly by a lake in mid-Vermont. It’s a venerable camp of the old school, keeping one eye on character building and emotional growth—with lots of challenges, from arts to sports to long camping trips—and the other on planned freedom, offering the camper a fistful of opportunities to get busy or lay back. It isn’t a tony establishment, but a rough and ready one, a place where you’ll glean a few experiences that will benefit you later in life (“risk is good, but survival is better”) or, as Eisner says, not without a hint of distaste, that will allow you to endure “Hollywood antics and boardroom politics.” The story he tells is a braided and generous one, of his own growth at the camp from ages 8 to 22, a span that brought many firsts—being away from home, pulling his own weight, learning the importance of tradition, taking on responsibilities he knew would test his abilities. It’s the story also of two boys Eisner later sponsored at the camp, Pepe and Q, from down-if-not-out Los Angeles. The two bring a very different quality to the camp than the regulars do. Their stories are interesting if not compelling—maybe because Eisner didn’t see the events when they happened but had an operative observe them and report back. But Eisner’s own recollections are smart and immediate: remembering the camp’s surroundings, the tents and halls and playing fields, the bite of not winning awards, his clowning as a staffman, finding himself once in charge of a bloodied camper miles from nowhere, or remembering the sachem qualities of the camp’s long-time director.
A well-told story of the raw ingredients of growing up, free of bluster but full of brio. (Eight-page photo insert, not seen)Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-446-53369-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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