Written with both thoughtfulness and Çlan, this is a Jewish intellectual’s remembrance of coming of age during the Depression, WWII, and the immediate post-war period. Editor and critic Solotaroff (A Few Good Voices in My Head: Occasional Pieces on Writing, Editing, and Reading My Contemporaries, 1987, etc.) focuses largely on his relationship with his parents: his father, a hypercritical, domineering man who often is “oblivious to other people’s feelings, ‘’ and his mother, an emotionally supportive but mostly passive woman whose behavior usually is characterized by “scatteredness and dependency.” He also writes about his slow transformation from an unruly, sometimes delinquent adolescent to a young man with serious intellectual inclinations. With its many fine passages on competition and friendships with other boys, and on men, sports, curiosity about sexual dalliances with women, and military service, Solotaroff’s book expresses a vigorous masculine sensibility. As for his Jewishness, it’s considerably less important than his Americanness and is found more in family dynamics than in religious observance or even ethnic solidarity. Thus, Solotaroff observes that, for him at the time, WWII and the Holocaust were “as existentially remote as a movie.” His well-crafted book, which is just the right length, contains such piquant passages as this about service in the postwar navy, which was “an abrupt immersion in the working class, in its crudity and cruelty, its noise, crowdedness, and stinks, its narrowness and dullness. Also, in its modes of adeptness, shrewdness, perseverance, its gregariousness and laughter, its loyalty and courage.— Having traveled with Solotaroff through the first two decades or so of his sometimes difficult and often very colorful life, readers will eagerly await a sequel.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-393-04679-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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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