Keeping on the level of the quotidian, Weideger’s work transports and entertains. But her journalistic endeavors are cobbled...
A mixed plunge into Venetian living.
Captivated by the delight that Venice casts over visitors—and ready for a change from all that is London—Weideger (Gilding the Acorn, not reviewed) rents an apartment in Venice for a month. What is an extraordinarily artistic and sensual city at first glance proves to be just the same on the everyday level for Weideger as she learns to find her way around the neighborhood she’s landed in. Drawn by the city’s beauty, she now wants its intimacy, to know its idiosyncrasies and peccadilloes. No shrinking violet, she fights for what she wants, be it a transportation pass, a chocolate pastry, or an apartment. Her living arrangements come in for ample description, but that’s no problem for the reader, since she winds up in an old palace with excellent views and detailing: “Two hundred years before, a master craftsman had been at work in this room. Clearly he had been a man with a light touch and an inclination to make inert materials dance.” Good, informal writing on the history of the family who owned the palace, and on Weideger’s rambles through the Jewish past of the city, bump up against stuffier material on the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation and art-preservation charities. Weideger is a journalist, and some of these sections give the feeling that she wanted to get extra mileage out of research for another project. Infinitely more appealing are her run-ins with her landlady (rather than the relationships she forms with Guggenheim’s heirs), and better by far is her story of a wicked car accident over her forays into flood-control planning.
Keeping on the level of the quotidian, Weideger’s work transports and entertains. But her journalistic endeavors are cobbled poorly to the personal, like awkwardly high new heels on comfy old shoes.Pub Date: June 4, 2002
ISBN: 0-671-04729-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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
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