Rambling but sometimes inspiring.
Former National Public Radio producer Ellis recalls the year she spent interviewing American centenarians for Morning Edition.
The author is willing to let her own anxieties seep frequently into the mix as she approaches stranger after stranger, all 100 or older. At first daunted by the occasional dementia and unresponsiveness, she wonders if the project is really a good idea. Then Ellis encounters some amazing centenarians, among them a woman who gets up early in the morning to row a boat on the lake by her house, occasionally indulging in skinny-dipping “when there’s no fishermen around”; a 101-year-old professor in his 71st year of teaching who tutors law students at New York’s Baruch College, using humor and a dry wit to impress the finer points of jurisprudence on slackers and hopeless cases; and an Oklahoma rancher looking for yet another wife. Ellis finds herself being drawn farther and farther into each of these twilight worlds, sensing rather than extracting into words the feelings of her subjects. When one man declares that the world is about to end, the hair on Ellis’s neck rises disconcertingly; it leads to a session with a (non-centenarian) psychotherapist about so-called limbic resonance phenomena, in which mammals’ brains apprehend others’ emotional states without benefit of the senses. In ensuing centenarian encounters, Ellis relaxes, worries less about controlling the pace or content, and just listens. Common threads emerge: it’s clear people who live this long basically want to; they would rather recall the good times than rail against the bad; most found love of one kind or other that became a central theme in their lives; and, finally, most are wistful about the vanishing of the work ethic and of unchallenged moral authority.
Rambling but sometimes inspiring.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2002
ISBN: 0-609-60842-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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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