An impressive bit of literary journalism and a sympathetic look at a vanished era.
The rise and fall of the ultimate hipster enclave as seen through the eyes of a heartbroken survivor.
In the early 1990s, when few were paying attention and the rest of the borough’s demographic still reflected years of white flight, droves of skinny Caucasians started a surprising reverse migration into an even more forsaken part of the borough to the north called Williamsburg. The costs of this new kingdom were grungy hovels and the occasional dark-corner knife attack—an easy bargain for wild American youths high on big-city dreams. Many of Anasi’s (Literary Journalism/Univ. of California, Irvine; The Gloves: A Boxing Chronicle, 2002) cohorts reveled in their cracked concrete cocoons, sheathed from the perceived banalities of the inauthentic wider world outside Williamsburg. Most were flat broke, but awash in a tide of easy sex, drugs and music. The party would not last long, however. The high-rise building boom that billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg later unleashed on the city decimated Brooklyn’s stoop-side culture, and this time forgotten Williamsburg was included on the hit list. Left to lament the uncanny transformation and the passing of his youth, the author found himself roaming Williamsburg’s sanitized waterfront as a literary wraith intent on reanimating the untamed lives of those he once knew. With a fine ear for dialogue and a nonjudgmental eye, Anasi conjures the pre-9/11 atmosphere of the place, in which the beer flowed like water and there was always a place to crash after a night of pub crawling.
An impressive bit of literary journalism and a sympathetic look at a vanished era.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-53331-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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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