The self-absorption can be off-putting, but the frankness, quirky style and light touch are a winning combination even so.
The art of navel-gazing carried to a new high (or low) in a sometimes whiny and exasperating, yet very funny diary of a pregnancy from six hours after conception to two weeks after C-section.
Eckler, a lifestyle columnist for Canada’s National Post, a job that involves interviewing celebrities and covering film and bar openings, is sure she’s pregnant when she wakes up the morning after her engagement party. A couple of weeks later, she confirms it with no fewer than four home pregnancy tests. When she proposes writing about it for the National Post, her boss agrees and gives the story a front-page headline. A minor celebrity in her own right, and an unabashed fan of celebrities (“Kate Hudson is pregnant! I’m so excited. It’s so much better when you live your life alongside a celebrity’s. It makes what you’re going through all the more relevant”), Eckler is determined that pregnancy and motherhood won’t change her glamorous, party-girl life. She divides her diary, based on her columns in the Post, into trimesters, “The Longest Three Months of My Life,” “The Fat Months” and “The Even Fatter Months.” Appearance is clearly paramount. While pleased when her breasts grow fuller, she is appalled when her eating-for-two diet of Big Macs and fries shows up on her hips. “Is my ass fat?” she asks again and again and again of the nameless father-to-be, referred to throughout as simply “the fiancé.” Meanwhile, she worries that a certain “Sexy Young Intern” is after her job, acquires an attentive new friend, “Cute Single Man,” and struggles to keep up with her single, designer-clad, still slim, barhopping girlfriends. Not to be mistaken for a pregnancy guide, Eckler’s chronicle offers little advice, unless you count the recommendation to get a bikini wax and a pedicure before going to the hospital.
The self-absorption can be off-putting, but the frankness, quirky style and light touch are a winning combination even so.Pub Date: April 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-345-47575-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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