A loving tribute to a woman who taught her daughters to value beauty and joy.
A luminously written debut describes a mother-daughter relationship filled with affection and refreshingly free of the usual resentments.
Steiker’s memoir about a happy family blessed with love and affluence does not depict famous friends, parents from hell, or a miserable childhood. Instead, Steiker offers a warm appreciation of her Belgian-Jewish mother Gisèle, who celebrated life with elegance and élan whether she was planning the family’s travels or obsessively considering window treatments. The author also relates her own reactions to her mother’s influence, juxtaposing events in Gisèle’s life with details of Valerie’s childhood, the year in adolescence when she separated herself from her mother (“Suddenly everything she did drove me up the wall”), and her first love. After her father was taken to Auschwitz (where he died), Gisèle spent WWII in hiding with her mother Bella in German-occupied Belgium. When Bella remarried, Gisèle, beautiful and full of life, moved to Paris. (Valerie did the same many years later in an attempt to remain connected after her mother’s death.) In her 20s, Gisèle came to New York, where she took acting lessons with Lee Strasberg, then made a detour to Mexico for an affair with a married man. Back in New York in 1966, she met Jerry Steiker, who taught her that love could mean happiness rather than suffering. Gisèle was a devoted wife and mother, an exemplary housekeeper, and an avid collector. She kept every letter she received—her way, Steiker suggests, of reminding her daughters that records and objects give life meaning. Valerie was deeply affected by Gisèle’s death when she was still in college; it wasn’t until she was nearly 30 that the author realized she could remain connected to her mother but also move forward and make a life of her own.
A loving tribute to a woman who taught her daughters to value beauty and joy.Pub Date: May 3, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-42101-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
