A trenchant and witty book on maturity and “middle-age shock.”
A bestselling American author and journalist living in Paris investigates the “undeniably transitional” decade of the 40s.
As she neared the end of her 30s, Druckerman (Bébé Day by Day: 100 Keys to French Parenting, 2013, etc.) suddenly noticed how people—and especially Parisian waiters—addressed her using the matronly “madame” rather than the more youthful “mademoiselle.” To understand the “new rules” of maturity, the author began to assess every aspect of her life. The marriage and more stable life Druckerman acquired by her mid-30s brought with them a need to remove the dysfunctional friendships that she collected with ease in her youth. The French-born children she had with her British husband made her feel like the “ruler of a tiny country” always subject to judgment by her opinionated “subjects.” Middle age also gave new impetus to last-fling experiments—e.g., the ménage-à-trois she planned for her husband’s 40th birthday—and the author offers extended ruminations on wrinkles, arm cellulite, and the fashion faux pas of older women. When a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (for which Druckerman was successfully treated) put her face to face with her mortality, she was unexpectedly overcome with new gratitude for being alive. Research into middle age revealed that the so-called midlife crisis was actually “a cultural construct,” but one that nevertheless continued to offer those seeking answers—like the author—a narrative for how “life [was] supposed to go.” In the end, French culture offered her the most satisfying answer: that aging was a matter of learning how to feel comfortable in one’s skin and “live out the best version of [one’s] age.” Half memoir and half ironic how-to guide, Druckerman’s book is not only a humorous meditation on the gains and pains of a time in life “when you become who you are”; it is also a thought-provoking meditation on “what it means to be a grown-up.”
A trenchant and witty book on maturity and “middle-age shock.”Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59420-637-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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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