Moving and honest, if a trifle claustrophobic: Mehta’s scrupulous attention to detail makes his account astonishing vivid...
Four Girls and a Doctor: Mehta offers his recollections of the mostly unhappy love affairs that preoccupied his early years in New York, and of the psychoanalyst who helped him get over them.
As a memoirist, Mehta (A Ved Mehta Reader, 1998, etc.) has made a career out of the rather extraordinary circumstances of his childhood and education. The son of a cultured and well-connected physician, Mehta grew up in India and nearly died of meningitis when he was four. Although he recovered, the raging fever brought on by the disease left him permanently blind. Since there were no schools for the blind in India at the time, Mehta was given an informal education at home by his father, and in 1949 (at 15), he traveled by himself to America and enrolled in a school for the blind in Little Rock, Arkansas. He later studied at Oxford and did graduate work at Harvard. This volume describes his early years in New York during the 1960s, when he was working as a staff writer at the New Yorker and beginning to establish his reputation as an essayist and journalist of renown. Most of the author’s recollections here, however, are of the various women he fell in love with during that time. Some of the affairs (with the dancer Gigi, for instance) were uncomplicated and relatively harmless, but others (such as his long romance with a poet and graduate student named Kilty, whom he nearly married) failed spectacularly and left the author in deep depressions that took years of therapy to undo. The last section of the account depicts Mehta’s dealing with one Dr. Bak, a Hungarian psychoanalyst who helped him sort out his feelings towards his lovers and himself.
Moving and honest, if a trifle claustrophobic: Mehta’s scrupulous attention to detail makes his account astonishing vivid and real, although many of the particular details (e.g., the prostate treatments he underwent to overcome his supposed impotence) are a tad more informative than necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56025-321-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2025 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.
