A contemplative, profoundly moving meditation on life, love and death.
In her debut, Los Angeles Review poetry and translations editor Chernov probes her grief over losing a much-loved father and the inability of contemporary society to accept profound emotion.
Returning to college after her father’s death, the difficulty the author discovered navigating college life was magnified by the response of those around her. Once a sought-after, popular girl, Chernov’s friends dropped away. She describes how this rejection deepened her sense of isolation from the college community. “My emotional baggage and I were not welcome in the college environment,” she writes, “but what I feared, and would soon learn, was that in our culture, emotional baggage of any kind threatens to slow us down to the point of being left behind.” The author’s family's life centered around a summer camp for girls in Wisconsin, which they owned and operated, created by her father's vision of a place where people could feel “loved and safe and free.” Growing up in this environment, Chernov felt cherished even though she was resentful of the campers who shared her family's life each summer. When her father was first diagnosed with cancer, the family was optimistic about a cure, but even as his health deteriorated, his love and determination to enjoy life to the end strengthened them. Chernov writes of her own painful coming-of-age, made more difficult by the stress of anticipating her father's death as his health declined, and how ultimately, she was able to embrace her father's decision not to waste the time he had left.
A contemplative, profoundly moving meditation on life, love and death.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61608-869-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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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