An atmospheric description of life in Belgrade, notwithstanding a few stylistic failings.
Radovic’s (Vuka: Destination Alaska, 2016) memoir tells the story of five boys growing up in mid-20th-century Yugoslavia.
This remembrance opens on Sept. 6, 1965, when the author enrolled at the First Belgrade Gymnasium, a school situated in the capital of what was then the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He soon bonded with four other boys: Serge, Zee, Jo, and Dee. Together, they formed a tight group called the Belgrade Five. The memoir chronicles two years of their lives together, which, in certain respects, reflect the lives of most teenage boys, punctuated by school pranks, soccer, and a burning desire for the opposite sex. What makes this book engaging is its setting: a country that the author describes in a preface as a place that “no longer exists” and “belonged more to the East than to the West, but mostly to itself.” The author captures beautifully what it meant to be a teenager in 1960s Belgrade, including the minute details of daily life in the kafana (a type of bistro): “smoke-filled, and desolate…a pressurized beer dispenser and several spherical spittoons on stands.” Yet there’s also the pull of Western culture: the author had a significant collection of rock records, ranging from the Beatles to the Shadows; “The best rock groups are British,” he told Jo. However, despite successfully capturing a unique moment in European history, this memoir fails to establish distinct identities for the boys, and it’s therefore difficult to follow their individual plights. This is compounded by the flat dialogue, which doesn’t modulate from character to character and often seems textbooklike, as when Jo discusses a soccer team: “Their coach Arribas insists on one-touch offensive and collective play called jeu a la Nantaise, without excessive dribbling or possession.” But although the staccato dialogue lacks the fluidity of true conversation, it doesn’t negate the book’s overall appeal. It’s still a passionate love letter to a city, a school, and a group of close friends, and it will attract readers with even a vague interest in Eastern European cities of the pre-perestroika era.
An atmospheric description of life in Belgrade, notwithstanding a few stylistic failings.Pub Date: June 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-9707-5
Page Count: 246
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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