As a travel writer, Liebermann is a work in progress, but the talent is there, needing only to be honed and refined.
A Jerusalem-based CNN correspondent’s memoir of round-the-world travel with a near-fatal disease.
In 2013, Liebermann and his wife left their jobs, determined to circumnavigate the globe on the cheap. The itinerary included Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and South America. Just shy of 30 and after only six years in broadcast news, declaring that “in making a living, I had failed to make a life” seems a little premature, even melodramatic. Alas, melodrama often overtakes the narrative and the narrator, whose overworked tear ducts seem a form of artistic expression. Apart from some harrowing close calls with diabetes, especially in Nepal, Liebermann tends to overstate his day-to-day accounts of dealing with his disease and roughing it on the road. The book harbors flashes of close observation and inspired description—e.g., his depictions of the Laotian people, his thoughts while camped (illegally) on the Great Wall of China, his account of the death of an anonymous man in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Unfortunately, these moments of inspiration are only intermittent, and the rest of the book suffers by comparison. For all his adventurousness and determination, Liebermann betrays a penchant for hasty judgments, weak generalizations, and trite pronouncements. When not detailing his duel with diabetes, which will resonate chiefly with other diabetics, he delivers a breezy series of snapshots and vignettes—engaging as far as they go but hardly the stuff of a memorable travelogue. Just because an insight is new to him does not mean it is of fresh coinage to readers, and Liebermann has a tendency to express a familiar observation as if it is being made for the first time. But it is a young man's book, a young traveler's book, and perhaps one should make allowances.
As a travel writer, Liebermann is a work in progress, but the talent is there, needing only to be honed and refined.Pub Date: May 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5107-1848-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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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