The jotted impressions in this postcardlike memoir will periodically intrigue or amuse, but ultimately leave readers pining...
In Ungar’s debut memoir, a twice-divorced Jewish mother explores Europe in 1974.
An earlier trip to Europe as a study-group chaperone for the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising prompts 36-year-old Ungar to leave her teenage sons with their father while she ventures abroad. Ignoring her mother’s vigorous objections, the unworldly Ungar initially travels to Uxbridge and Rome with a female friend. In Rome, the self-described romantic experiences her first of several passionate, but chastely described, encounters on her journey. When a hastily arranged plan of singing with two African-American women falls apart, Ungar becomes an au pair in St. Tropez, France. This four-month stint proves the most vivid, compelling adventure in the book. Forced to speak only French, the narrator deepens her recollections with snippets of humor, clear-eyed commentary and rich, sensory details. Luscious descriptions of French food, humorous anecdotes featuring a rambunctious boy and keen observations on fashion and island customs make for delightful reading. Elsewhere, Ungar slips repeatedly into dutiful prose, carefully recounting the precise details of sites seen, money spent and letters received. Glossing over unpleasantness such as a roommate’s inability to travel freely because of apartheid, the book focuses on happier, if more mundane, escapades such as the purchase of a yellow hat. A walk through a town where strangers approach and attempt to sell her drugs merits a single sentence. When the narrator hears talk in Germany about World War II and the Nazis, she reports feeling “emotional.” Being told, but not shown, the narrator’s inner state leaves the reader detached. At its best, this memoir charms readers with its minute details of day-to-day life outside of the U.S. in the early 1970s. In the end, it feels more like a historical record written for an inner circle, rather than a compelling tale for a wider audience.
The jotted impressions in this postcardlike memoir will periodically intrigue or amuse, but ultimately leave readers pining for a deeper connection.Pub Date: July 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-1461055297
Page Count: 240
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2011
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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