Honest but undistinguished.
A former New York publicist's memoir, written as an “open letter” to an imaginary daughter, about the circumstances and personal choices that caused her to remain childless.
Grossinger grew up the only daughter of a widowed Polish-born woman with a mysterious past. When she was 7, her father’s first cousin and scion of the family that owned Grossinger’s, “the most famous Jewish resort hotel in America,” invited mother and daughter to live in the Catskills. Treated like the poor relations they were, Karla worked long hours as a hostess without complaint while the author “did whatever the Grossinger family told me” and never expressed the anger she felt at the treatment she and her mother received. The author still managed to mingle with celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor, Jerry Lewis and Jackie Robinson, who stayed at the hotel as performers or visitors. Precocious and intelligent, she began college at Brandeis at age 15 and then began work as a fundraiser for the City of Hope in Los Angeles. After a brief marriage that would leave her emotionally shattered for life, Grossinger went to New York City, where she opened her own PR agency and represented such luminaries as Betty Friedan and Elsa Maxwell. Later, she became a publicist for Playboy and the infamous Playboy Club, and after that, a successful travel writer. Despite her career triumphs, Grossinger never came to terms with her husband’s rejection of her and became a woman who “desperately feared commitment.” Eventually, she found long-term love, but it was with a married man who refused to “break up his home any more than it was already broken.” Grossinger does not regret the trajectory of her remarkable life, nor does she apologize for it, but the narrative is disappointingly pedestrian and offers only glimmers of poignancy.
Honest but undistinguished.Pub Date: July 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62087-615-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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