A brief, affecting Gallic story of an enduring marriage that ended in senseless tragedy.
A deeply felt memoir from the wife of a cartoonist killed in the 2015 Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack.
One winter Wednesday in Paris, French journalist Wolinski was swiftly and savagely widowed after 47 years of marriage. Her husband was the well-known Georges Wolinski (1934-2015), the oldest cartoonist on the staff of the renowned satirical newspaper. On Jan. 7, Georges, leaving their apartment, called out to his wife, “darling, I’m going to Charlie.” Soon, he and 11 others were murdered by a pair of terrorist brothers to redress the publication’s cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. Relying on eyewitnesses, social media, and her memory, the author writes passionately of the assault and the days following. Early on, she wasn’t alerted to the killings. As the scene filled with police, reporters, and politicians, she wondered why Georges didn’t call to arrange a meeting that afternoon to view an apartment. She learned of the attack from a sympathetic taxi driver and of the death of her husband by a phone call from her son-in-law. Charlie Hebdo had been threatened before, but it was ill-equipped, even a bit lax, in its defense. Wolinski has little sympathy for the police, who, at union insistence, had reduced surveillance. The first responders consisted of two sparsely armed policemen on bicycles. Authorities did not call to inform her and did not tell her where her husband’s remains were taken. In a final affront, his name was misspelled on a memorial plaque at the offices. Ultimately, the author was able to draw solace from the many loving Post-it notes her husband habitually left for her throughout their apartment. No more than a day’s reading, Wolinski’s moving story will resonate with anyone who has unexpectedly lost a loved one.
A brief, affecting Gallic story of an enduring marriage that ended in senseless tragedy.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5489-8
Page Count: 136
Publisher: 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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