As interesting for what it doesn’t say (and the way it doesn’t say it) as for what it does.
There’s a fascinating story here, but one that’s less about Katrina, or even New Orleans, than about the author’s attempts to understand himself and his ambitions.
Wolf begins with the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, with the author writing from East Hampton, N.Y., filled with worry about “the city I’d left forty-two years before, had returned to so often, and still called home.” He thus decided to write this memoir in order “to preserve what I can, and understand what I have not.” As a sixth-generation member of a prominent New Orleans family, Wolf left the city to earn his doctorate in the history of art and architecture and to establish himself as an authority on urban planning. But he had also felt marginalized in a city where Jews were excluded from social clubs and Mardi Gras rituals and distanced from his parents, who seemed little interested in him. After a friend called him “an island,” he writes that “it wasn’t until years later that I realized he’d immediately seen how I was rather isolated from my parents, how I shriveled into myself, shrinking for need of the love and care that I felt I rarely got from them, no matter how hard I tried to be the good son.” Wolf offers scrumptious accounts of dining at Galatoire’s and Mosca’s (where menus were mainly for outsiders and tourists), but he more often focuses on himself as a bright but emotionally stunted young man as he separated himself from New Orleans, the family business and a series of romantic relationships for which he was emotionally ill-equipped. By the end of the memoir, having skipped over decades, even his failed 18-year marriage gets mentioned only in passing. Then the book concludes, as it began, with a few pages about the flood.
As interesting for what it doesn’t say (and the way it doesn’t say it) as for what it does.Pub Date: July 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-88-328556-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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