Schuman’s droll, self-deprecating, wild life (so far) will find particular appeal with readers who enjoy memoirs that don’t...
The candid adventures of a plucky, German-obsessed American student.
Slate columnist Schuman’s youth in the 1990s plays out through the nine chapters of her hilarious memoir, her first book. The author titles each chapter with a relevant German word, reflecting a mood or event in her self-discovery and her vivid love for German culture, including an enduring, lifelong affinity for Franz Kafka—who, she notes, wasn’t German. During her senior year in high school, this self-proclaimed “nonpracticing half-Jew from Oregon” spent her time poring over SAT practice tests and nurturing a fawning obsession with Dylan, a handsome, “so brilliant and so pained” geek who found Schuman’s brainy awkwardness intellectually stimulating. But his college dreams and personal goals stagnated any progression in their relationship. The author plodded on at college as a German major and then fully immersed herself in the culture, grammar, and history of life abroad. A culture clash ensued immediately as her host family found Schuman’s new “postgrunge aesthetic” quite different from her introductory photograph. Surviving on her own with a newfound independence breathed new life into her travels, and she moved into a loft residence in Berlin as a vegetarian and “moderate smoker.” Highlights include a mishap involving the recovery of her lost passport, pithy social observations, and epiphanies about how hypocritical Germanic culture can be. “They will think nothing of telling you that you have gained weight,” she writes, “but in other situations, they have ironclad laws of politeness.” The author’s comparison of Prague’s post–Cold War metamorphosis to Gregor Samsa’s own transformation is creatively descriptive, as is her account of her anxiety at being perceived as having Imposter Syndrome while at graduate school in Southern California. Built on her inner angst and painstaking quest for self-discovery throughout her burgeoning adulthood, Schuman’s memoir is a comedic patchwork of quirky anecdotes written in smooth, sometimes-cocky prose, liberally sprinkled with free-flowing expletives and consistent sincerity.
Schuman’s droll, self-deprecating, wild life (so far) will find particular appeal with readers who enjoy memoirs that don’t take themselves too seriously.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-07757-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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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