An entertaining and often laugh-out-loud—though not altogether atypical—story of soul-searching abroad.
A comical travel memoir documenting a young woman’s attempt to find herself overseas.
After playwright and aspiring actress Shukert (Have You No Shame?: And Other Regrettable Stories, 2008) unsuccessfully attempted to gain entrance into New York's acting elite, she ventured to Europe with the promise of a fresh start. En route, an Austrian custom's official absentmindedly forgot to stamp her passport, essentially giving her free reign throughout the continent. The author’s charming romp across Europe led her on an array of misadventures throughout Austria, France and Switzerland, before she settled in Amsterdam, where she had it on not-so-good authority that an acting role awaited her. The role fell through, but Shukert's experience in Amsterdam's Red Light District and marijuana-filled coffee shops functioned as entry points for even greater mishaps involving a predictable cast of characters, locals and expatriates alike. While the author’s travels left a trail of one-night stands and failed relationships in her wake, the humor with which she recounts her experiences allows her work to transcend beyond the cliché of overseas-love-affairs-gone-awry. Shukert is at her best when she probes the depths of her own identity, both as a transplanted Nebraskan Jew and as a failed actress. The humor drives the narrative, but the rare poignant moments are intimate and well-appreciated. Though readers will root for the author, it becomes difficult as she continually traps herself in nets of her own making. Shukert acknowledges this shortcoming, admitting that “I had come to Europe to grow up, to fall in love, to become the kind of person that I wanted to be. But the person I was becoming was destroying the person that I already was.” This confliction of identity, though regularly masked behind cheap laughs, is what sets Shukert’s book above similar travel memoirs.
An entertaining and often laugh-out-loud—though not altogether atypical—story of soul-searching abroad.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-178235-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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
PERSPECTIVES
© 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.
