Hoping to capture ``the special, unrealized gift of sisterness,'' fiction writer Stern (English/Univ. of Chicago; Shares, 1992, etc.) even invents a word—sistermony—to describe this extraordinary memoir of his sister's death and legacy. Four years older than the author, Ruth Stern Leviton died a long, slow death from cancer at 67 in August 1991. A sort of ``Jewish Katharine Hepburn,'' she was ``pretty, tall...cool and witty-looking.'' She was a lifelong New Yorker and had been, among other things, personnel manager and supervisor of contracts at Simon & Schuster. Stern's relationship with his big sister was comprised of ``possessiveness and protectiveness...as well as annoyance, jealousy, rivalry, and fury.'' Though much of their relationship was characterized by bonhomie and laughter, and though the more nurturing side of Ruth's sisterly love showed only rarely in adulthood, it did show up when needed, during Stern's own crises like illness and divorce. As they rehash life with their parents, the hodgepodge of aunts, uncles, and cousins, Stern realizes that he wants Ruth to tell him before she goes, about his infancy and toddlerhood, ``the life I'd lived but didn't remember.'' While it's difficult to sort out Stern's family members, his personal reminiscences of Ezra Pound and Thomas Mann, and anecdotes from decades of friendship with Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and others are delightful and revealing. But the heart and soul of this memoir is his painstaking, progressively unsparing descriptions of the minutiae of slow dying: the injections; the draining of fluids; the black-and-blue slack skin; the munching of ice chips to relieve a dry mouth; the lapses into semi-consciousness (``Keep talking. I like to hear your voice''); and Ruth's deathbed humor (``I knew I vuzn't in duh best a helt—but diss!).'' An unheralded master, Stern has penned a small masterpiece, an intimate, cherishable American classic on death and dying—and sisterhood. (Photos)
Pub Date: March 20, 1995
ISBN: 1-55611-427-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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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