A mostly compelling book about a complicated question: if identity is made of memory and memory does not cohere, how do we...
Singer’s first book is a memoir of two obsessions: with California and with finding a place for herself.
The story begins with the dissolution of the author’s family and her move, at 16, with younger siblings, mother, and stepfather, from Montreal to California, a place with which she has been absorbed for years. “My affair with California begins many years before we meet,” writes the author, recalling an early library encounter with a book about the Golden State. “A state?” she wondered. “Like New York, where we drive once a year across the border to do our school shopping, hiding new clothes and shoes deep in our Jeep’s trunk on the way back, away from the customs officials so we don’t have to pay extra taxes?” Singer’s glee at being in California was complicated by a custody battle involving one of her brothers. “Are you sexually active?” That was the question the opposing counsel asked her just before she took the stand on her mother’s behalf. It was a treacherous moment, but while Singer draws her structure from it—the book is built, more or less, as a series of interrogations and responses—she is interested in treachery of a more personal sort. The author is at her best when she uses narrative to examine disconnection, as with the Taylors, a family for whom she worked yet never quite belonged. “Two of my own families,” she writes, “have already exploded. Nuclear family has not proved successful, but still I am drawn to it.” This search for place took Singer north, where she researched a serial killer in Yosemite, though she was really looking for herself. As the book progresses, it becomes less fragmentary. On one hand, that’s inevitable given the difficulty of stitching together a book of fragments. On the other, it’s disappointing given the strength of her fractured approach.
A mostly compelling book about a complicated question: if identity is made of memory and memory does not cohere, how do we build a self from the shards?Pub Date: March 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9988257-1-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hawthorne Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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