A quiet meditation on the great significance of small things.
Genial and sometimes lyrical memoir of a South Dakota girlhood and an East Coast adolescence and adulthood—with Tolstoy and Anna Karenina serving as signposts along the way.
Andersen (editorial writer for the Providence Journal) has no grand or pretentious ambitions, despite the continual Tolstoy allusions, despite her references to other intellectual heavyweights like Sartre, Proust, Matthew Arnold, Keats and Kierkegaard. (To show her populist passions she also mentions Doris Day, Nancy Sinatra, June Cleaver, The Rifleman, Roy Rogers and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) Instead, she looks for significance in the mundane, explores the loneliness of a prairie childhood, wonders at the allure of place, and marvels at coincidence and fate. She tells about her childhood in a town she calls “Plainville,” describing the old family home, her experiences at church camp, her Barbie collection, her favorite TV show (Fury), her memories of the JFK assassination and of the Watts riots. She did well in high school—very well—and headed off to Princeton, where she met an odd young man with a mole (she calls him “The Mole,” seemingly unaware of comedian Mike Myers’s m-m-m-mole-moments in Austin Powers in Goldmember, 2002—there go her pop-culture credentials!). Following Princeton, she migrated to Cambridge, Mass., and worked as a secretary at Harvard Law before finding herself in journalism, the family profession (her parents ran a weekly back in South Dakota). Andersen takes us many places—Scandinavia and Jerusalem, among the more exotic—and writes eloquently about how her new home in the East is both lovely and inadequate (it’s not South Dakota). Most effectively, she relates the stark arrival of MS in her mother’s life. In a spare, perfect sentence, she captures it: “She has gone off somewhere, become Job.” She ends with a surreal account of the death of a young woman on train tracks near her home—a final Anna allusion.
A quiet meditation on the great significance of small things.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-32689-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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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