In this debut memoir, a journalist retraces his steps in the hope that his beloved grandchildren will understand the forces that shaped him.
With palpable fondness, Cohen addresses the story of his colorful life directly to his grandchildren, several of whom live too far away for regular contact. In seeking to make his experiences real for them, he offers all of his readers a vivid portrait of a particular segment of 20th-century life. Beginning with his childhood in New Jersey as the son of an Italian mother and a Jewish father, Cohen captures the contradictions of American multiculturalism in his descriptions of his warm, rowdy Italian relatives (complete with a recipe for spaghetti and meatballs) and Jewish grandfather, whose cold silence masks the pain of the Russian pogroms and the loss of his wife to influenza. Ancestors, family members, and neighborhood characters come alive in Cohen’s lively episodic prose, as in one scene where a local gangster responds to his “trick or treat” with a box of 48 Hershey bars (“plain, no almonds”). Through it all, Cohen is appealingly self-deprecating as he owns up to his mistakes, including his first job as a Good Humor man, when he cannot resist giving away ice cream to “curly-haired little girls”; a college alcohol binge that results in the death of a friend; and his tendency to nearly get fired on the first day of each of his journalism jobs. Some of Cohen’s most intriguing passages describe his career working for newspapers in Illinois and Connecticut and his years at the news service United Press International, where he had an up-close view of pivotal historical and political events while seeking the ever elusive Pulitzer Prize. The book is long and episodic (Cohen suggests early on that audiences may wish to “color outside the lines and select chapters randomly”), and some readers may find his presentation choppy. But the narrative is so warm and exuberant that few should be able to resist it.
An affectionate and compelling account of the life of a reporter that is deeply personal and irreverently comic.
Pub Date: June 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4907-8240-9
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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