Wistful, bittersweet odyssey of a bad business deal.
Sometime stage manager and screenwriter Stone describes a sojourn in the eastern Aegean darkly tinged by recrimination, doubt, and regret.
Perhaps it’s the author’s decision to disguise the exact location of his foray into food service on the Greek island of Patmos, as well as to change the names of pivotal characters, that brings overtones of contrivance to haunt this narrative. In his early 40s, Stone leases a taverna in partnership with the owner for a single summer of fantasy-fulfillment. He’s accompanied by his French wife Danielle, a cipher save for the attributes of sensual beauty coupled with textbook Gallic moral superiority, and their two young children. From there ensues a series of events in which a stereotypical American babe in the woods enraptured by a foreign culture bumps up against the reality of how its actual members live day to day. While Stone is eminently capable of setting the scene and telling a story, he is not a natural humorist. His shtick is to overindulge in self-deprecation while vacillating between idolatry and assassination of supposed Greek national character traits. The author maintains, for example, that if you are a guest in a Greek’s house, “he’ll give you the shirt off his back,” but that if you have done prior business with him, “it’s probably your shirt.” This less-than-subtle approach assures that readers will feel foreboding even as the lights twinkle in the summer night and customers flock in, confirming at least temporarily Stone’s theory that an amateur cook with his expertise could successfully upgrade a typical taverna’s fare. (He includes a few recipes from a menu of mostly familiar Greek dishes, with a couple of eclectic additions like chili con carne.) When the denouement arrives, replete with temptation, betrayal, guilt, and alienation, it lands like a plate of cold moussaka.
Wistful, bittersweet odyssey of a bad business deal.Pub Date: July 3, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-0541-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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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