A journal that may grace enough night tables to assuage the author’s avowed concerns about her bank balance.
A teacher and practitioner of creative writing gives the journal treatment to six years of her life.
In her 60s, Theroux (Giovanni’s Light: The Story of a Town Where Time Stopped for Christmas, 2002, etc.) recorded her thoughts from 2000 to 2005. Here she presents them in a memoir of passing notions she considers worth savoring. She reflects on the pleasures of authorship and on the care of her mother, who seemed to posses psychic energy fields both before and after her death. The author chronicles her travels to Italy for writing seminars and the completion of a successful book while there, and she worries about her finances and the process of aging. With the thoughtful intimations of mortality come solipsistic paroxysms of passion and confusion. (The romance turns out well). Theroux writes of neighbors and nature, marks the passage of a pair of mallards and muses on the activities of an inchworm. In the elegiac tone of Our Town or E.B. White in full rustic mode, she pushes to make mundane matters large. She luxuriates in fanciful figures of speech—a friend is “like the net around a bag of onions”; living in small-town Ashland, Va., she sometimes feels “like a bulb in a teacup”—and she includes snippets from some of her favorite writers, including Thoreau, Emerson, Arthur Miller and Karen Armstrong. For current commentary and explanation, the author interrupts, in italics, the story by her former self. On the whole, Theroux offers pleasant reading and a few deep thoughts surrounded by stylish writing probably most appealing to female readers.
A journal that may grace enough night tables to assuage the author’s avowed concerns about her bank balance.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1897-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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