A diary of devastation too good not to share.
A heartfelt and hyperliterate take on love as a mixtape.
Coviello (English/Univ. of Illinois, Chicago; Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America, 2013, etc.) tells the story of recovering from his life's greatest loss to date: the breakup of his marriage and family. A sheltered young English professor, the author met and married an older woman with children. Her affair with a co-worker a few years later shattered his world and left him in the precarious, nonlegal role of ex-stepfather to her two daughters. Coviello recounts memories in the present tense, and the 18 songs of the title prove closer to 30, with each chapter evoking a few pop songs that trigger memories surrounding the dissolution of his marriage. His sincerity is by turns insufferable and irresistible, but he is a true believer in the power of love and in the magic of certain pop songs to encapsulate, transform, infect, and heal. His personal compilation mixes tunes that remind him of his bewitchingly broken ex-wife, Evany, with songs that evoke his feelings as a suburban man learning to love and be loved by other people, plus a few tracks for the loyal friends who picked him up each time he collapsed in grief. With its convoluted syntax and attenuated musings about love and the inner life, Coviello’s style imitates his heroes Henry James and George Eliot, and reading his book feels a bit like finding a cache of letters from one close friend to another, with the writer casually unraveling on the page. Summing up one’s life in a list of carefully chosen tracks has developed into something of a microgenre, with pop songs serving as the madeleines for the last pre-digital generation. While some other High Fidelity–inspired memoirs undoubtedly “do” the music better, few outpace the grim vivacity of Coviello’s writing or match the depth of feeling he summons from the soundtrack of his own neuroses.
A diary of devastation too good not to share.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-14-313233-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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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