More proof that funny e-mails and a good blog do not necessarily add up to a good book.
Former Family Circle marketing director McCorkindale writes about adapting to life on a Virginia cattle farm.
Burnt out from her demanding job and frightened by 9/11, the debut author gave in to her husband’s dream of leaving suburban New Jersey for the pastoral paradise of Upperville, Va. She kissed goodbye the high-six-figure salary that had her “dripping in Donna Karan,” packed her six- and 13-year-old sons in the Durango, and accompanied her spouse South to raise chickens. McCorkindale christened their 1890 farmhouse “Nate’s Place” because her literary husband, nicknamed “Hemingway,” noted its resemblance to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s home. The fish-out-of-water story is divided into short chapters that read as self-contained anecdotes, each including a fluffy e-mail, a set of tips or a top-ten list at the end. (The most worthwhile is “The Impractical Girl’s Guide to Farm Speak.”) The author’s rural misadventures included rollerblading through a cattle guard, rescuing Hemingway from a toppled chicken perch, running from a stampede of cows, schvitzing in the double Burberry turtlenecks she donned in emulation of the locals (she drew the line at riding pants), and chasing loose hens in Via Spiga stilettos (two in a lengthy parade of designer shoes). But frustrations such as cheerless DMV workers, slow bank tellers and unreliable contractors, McCorkindale might be disappointed to know, are not unique to the countryside. The author is at her funniest when recounting her faux pas: assuming that “riding” meant the subway, or not knowing what address to give the 911 operator (numberless estate name or P.O. box?). Her prose is chatty and upbeat, conveying an odd mix of self-effacement and snobbishness. (Continual references to her pre-move success and fashion-police smackdowns will alienate some readers.) The book’s 227 footnotes range from shout-outs to loved ones to entirely separate stories, most of which are distracting and should have been cut.
More proof that funny e-mails and a good blog do not necessarily add up to a good book.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-451-22493-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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
PERSPECTIVES
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