by Radka Yakimov ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 18, 2006
An affecting memoir of circumstance, absence, and renewal.
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Yakimov (Ashes of Wars, 2011, etc.) remembers her childhood and adolescence in Cold War Bulgaria.
Yakimov begins her memoir with accounts of the bomber raids on Sofia during the dark days of the second world war, when her family and neighbors would crouch in the basement awaiting their unknown fates. From the death of Czar Boris III and the arrival of the Stalinists to her eventual escape through West Germany and on to Canada in the 1960s, Yakimov documents her youth in the impoverished People’s Republic of Bulgaria. She began keeping a diary in 1952; her father noted her dedication to it: “Is your diary a reflection of your life, or are you living for the sake of the diary?” The document (some of it reprinted here) serves as the departure point for the memoir: a memory-jogger and primary source that recorded her preoccupations and conjectures regarding her family, education, and future. The Yakimov of the present, with the benefit of perspective and the pull of nostalgia, relates the quirks of her friends and relations, anecdotes and experiences proving that, regardless of circumstance, people behave like people—humorously, aspirationally, sometimes selflessly. The prose is a pleasure to read: Yakimov has a great sense of image and narrative that fixes the reader in her gritty world. Additionally, she’s a tremendous writer of the human spirit. Her empathy for individuals is great even as her criticism of institutions is barbed. A sense of loss (for both the Bulgaria of her parents’ youth and the Bulgaria of her own) haunts the prose like smoke that won’t disappear. While the account of conditions under the communists is fascinating, the heart of the text lies in the minutiae of Yakimov’s household: her stoic father, her strong-willed mother, her family’s lore and hardship. The memoir accomplishes the admirable task of humanizing people who lived under an increasingly dehumanizing system. Readers will be thankful so much has been remembered and recorded yet conscious of how much more has been lost.
An affecting memoir of circumstance, absence, and renewal.Pub Date: July 18, 2006
ISBN: 978-0595390717
Page Count: 248
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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