A sometimes-affecting, intriguing reminiscence of growth and young love in the hills of northern Israel.
In her debut memoir, Wagner recounts finding her identity in a country that was doing the same.
Israel has changed a lot since the early 1960s, when Wagner saw it for the first time. “But back then, Israel and I were in many ways coming of age like a pair of adolescents….In that sense, the country’s cocky chutzpah and can-do attitude were a good match for my own mix of idealism and bravado.” She had gone to work on a kibbutz (a collective farm), founded by some friends of her parents, doing chores in the house and the fields alongside other international students. There she met a young French Jew named René, with whom she unexpectedly fell in love. Wagner had come to Israel for a number of reasons: to understand the Jewishness of her secular American father, whose religion and ancestry felt somewhat remote to her; to experience the alienation her own mother felt, as an Englishwoman who had moved with Wagner’s father to—and then all around—the United States; and to do something without her identical twin sister, Naomi, with whom she had always been intertwined. What Wagner found, however, was a strong connection to culture and place that would shape the rest of her life. The prose here paints a vivid portrait of rural Israeli life at the time, capturing the optimism of the place and of young adulthood in general. It’s a romantic portrayal of a country coming into its own, though as she looks back from the vantage point of history, Wagner tempers some of her earlier exuberance, as when she discusses her admiration of young Israeli soldiers: “I couldn’t help feeling a kindred spirit with these rosy-cheeked recruits tasked with the country’s defense. In those days, it never occurred to me how a Palestinian might feel on the wrong end of their firepower.” Part travel memoir, part family saga, part coming-of-age tale, Wagner’s book records a milieu that is simultaneously simple and complex. Though hardly a page-turner, the memoir gives a sympathetic outsider’s view of the kibbutz movement and the early days of Israeli nationhood.
A sometimes-affecting, intriguing reminiscence of growth and young love in the hills of northern Israel.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-529-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
