A middling memoir of self-discovery.
On a skiing trip around the world, the author loses herself in order to find herself and unexpectedly finds love in the process.
Except for the skis and the mountains, the narrative arc of this memoir sounds very much like that of other books that have become popular accounts of transformative pilgrimages—see: Elizabeth Gilbert and Cheryl Strayed. The main difference is that there was no real crisis that impelled Jagger on her quest. “We wait until we’re broken…before we examine ourselves, before we look in the mirror,” writes the author. “No one ups and changes a close to perfect life.” So why did she quit her solid sales-and-marketing job, go into debt, and commit to skiing some 4 million vertical feet over the course of one year? “A small amount of boredom had crept into my life of late,” she writes. “I was content, happy with everything I had and everything I’d done, but it still wasn’t enough.” Though the scenery is spectacular—Japan, New Zealand, France—both the writer and readers discover that descriptions of skiing can also be boring, or at least repetitive, punctuated by the occasional tumble that leaves her on all fours and questioning why she was doing such a thing. Eventually, Jagger learned that sometimes a ski trip isn’t just a ski trip but, “in many ways, my very own rite of passage, one about knowing and owning every sacred ounce of myself.” Along the way, the author met many fellow seekers and even fell in love, but only after she’d also become involved with someone else. “I’m not gonna lie, things were really on fire for me in the titillation department,” she writes. Yet after committing to the man who had initially seemed remote and indifferent to her, she discovered a relationship that went even deeper than love, a relationship that proceeded through “our first official vagina worshipping” by her “own vagina whisperer.”
A middling memoir of self-discovery.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-241810-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper Wave
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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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