While her stories are moving and the scenery is as beautifully caught as with a camera, Sovich reaches for spiritual life...
Journalist Sovich’s first book details her travels to Africa in search of adventure.
The author’s story—though not the book—begins with her childhood with a mother who traveled, Sovich believed, to escape her suburban Connecticut life. When the author found herself living in Paris with her husband, working a hated job and uncomfortable with her role, she decided to follow in her mother’s footsteps. Instead of a short getaway, her trip to Africa was a desperate attempt to reconnect to her youth and be transformed into someone else. That trip was the first of three that make up this memoir. While spending as little money as possible and traveling rapidly, she often put herself in significant danger and missed what she went to experience. When Sovich decided to fly home midjourney, her husband labeled her travel style perfectly: martyrdom. He also told her to return to Africa and make her trip to Timbuktu the right way, and she listened. With experience to guide her, Sovich set out to experience the road to Timbuktu in an open, engaged way. Her descriptions of the West African countries she visited are engrossing. She captures a welcoming and friendly attitude she missed on her first trip and paints a picture of immersing herself in the lives of the people around her. Unfortunately, many of the lessons Sovich claimed to have learned don’t stick during the second trip, making her sound somewhat immature. The third trip feels confusing and unnecessary, with little to add to the narrative. Her aha-moment, supposedly reached with new insight from her travels, is described in so little detail that it seems incongruous and ill-considered rather than inspired and enlightened.
While her stories are moving and the scenery is as beautifully caught as with a camera, Sovich reaches for spiritual life lessons that fail to ring true.Pub Date: July 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-544-02595-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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