A new treat for Gilbert’s many fans.
Grateful readers tell why Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir became such a phenomenal success.
After Eat Pray Love was published in 2006, the author was overwhelmed by readers who told her that the book had changed their lives—but she didn’t know quite how. “It was only seeing the incredible range of submissions that came pouring in for this anthology that I finally got it,” she writes in the introduction. Most of the contributors repeated the same story: the book made them realize, “my life doesn’t have to look like this anymore.” That is the theme of the nearly 50 short essays—most by women—in a collection that is both inspiring and, for Gilbert, self-congratulatory. Many entries end by thanking “Liz,” as the writers often call her, for waking them up and convincing them that they “are allowed to change” and “to assert agency over the direction you go next.” Many writers were depressed, and all were feeling stuck and unsatisfied with their lives. Some were sick with HIV, cancer, anorexia, and other illnesses. Some were mired in bad marriages, many were bored, and others were fearful. “I learned to forgive myself for being scared and imperfect, for making mistakes,” one woman writes. “I stopped allowing myself to use those mistakes as an excuse to not try new things.” Self-affirmation is a recurrent theme: “Liz showed me that we cannot heal without loving our whole selves,” wrote a woman who had suffered debilitating back pain that made her feel “trapped” in her body. “Eat Pray Love gave me the chutzpah to jump into the ultimate unknowing,” said a woman suffering from late-stage Lyme disease, referring to her decision to enroll in an experimental stem cell treatment program in India. For some, the ultimate unknowing meant ending a marriage, setting out on travel, or, for one woman, signing up for six weeks of burlesque classes.
A new treat for Gilbert’s many fans.Pub Date: March 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-57677-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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