A flawed but well-intentioned, genuine memoir.
Stage- and screenwriter and performer Balbirer (Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences, 2009) interweaves the story of her marriage with that of her beloved dog.
When Ira, the author’s 11-year-old beagle, was diagnosed with kidney failure, her personal life was in shambles. She and her husband of 11 years, Sam, had not had sex “in several years” and were exploring everything from couples’ therapy to New Age “love seminars.” Ira had been their “wedding gift to each other at a time when our partnership was the perfect alignment of taste, sensibility, humor, and love.” Now their marriage, which had withstood Sam’s decision to leave a career in law, infertility, a complicated pregnancy, and moves between Los Angeles and New York, was fraught with resentment and acrimony on both sides. Sam wanted the author to assume greater responsibility for their wine bar/restaurant business so that he could pursue a career in music. Balbirer worried about putting money neither one of them had into a business that seemed risky and the temporary nature of the life they built together in Manhattan. Meanwhile, the author spent thousands of dollars trying to keep Ira alive. Then Balbirer discovered that Sam was having an affair but continued to cling to the hope that she could somehow manage to save her marriage. Her health suffered and she lost weight, but slowly, she realized that the nostalgia for her marriage was really nostalgia for a romantic ideal that “had never existed.” When Ira died just over a year after his diagnosis, the author had finally come to terms with the fact that surrender to the truth of her situation was not about “giving up…[but about] letting go of the illusions.” Though too heavily focused on the minutiae of Balbirer’s relationship and sometimes difficult to follow due to the shifting chronology, the narrative offers an intimate look at the difficulties of marriage and a heartfelt tribute to a beloved dog.
A flawed but well-intentioned, genuine memoir.Pub Date: June 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-4002-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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