An entertaining personal essay, short and sweet, about the cars in the life of Holroyd.
Prodigious British biographer and memoirist Holroyd (A Book of Secrets, 2011, etc.) tells of memorable automobiles in his life and in the lives of those about whom he has written.
Do not mistake this neat little book for your kid’s chapter book, though it features a large font, heavily leaded; generous margins; innocent illustrations; and just over 100 pages. It is entertainment for grown-up readers, especially of the Anglophilic sort. Holroyd has become aware that, somehow, his many books, including the biographies, have often featured automotive transportation. This text is about the automobiles of his oft-married parents and his own coming-of-age with cars. The author grew up in the congenial company of his grandparents’ permanently parked Ford, but he didn’t learn to drive until he was 30. Holroyd’s story concerns the cars he drove, the cars his biographical subjects drove and how they were all driven. The telling is as full of wit as it is fraught with harmless collisions and idiosyncratic journeys. There’s a comic ride on an emblematic double-decker. Holroyd examines the Royal Automobile Club early in the 20th century, a time when it was dubious whether the gentle members of the distaff side were suited to take the wheel. He pays tribute to the memory of his first car and recalls his years in the army as a driving instructor who had no driver’s license. Throughout is the evocative nomenclature of vehicles, unsung or famous, of the past. The cavalcade includes Vauxhalls, Biancas, Lanchesters, Rolls-Royces, Fords, Zodiacs and Zephyrs. (The author favors Honda Accords).
An entertaining personal essay, short and sweet, about the cars in the life of Holroyd.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-22657-2
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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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