A personal recollection and tribute that’s loaded with engaging historical tidbits.
A family memoir that focuses on the life of an intrepid young woman who left her family in Montenegro to become a dedicated Alaskan.
Radovic (Getting to Know the Manager, 2014) first met Vuka Stepovich, his great-aunt, when he visited her in Saratoga, California, in 1973, when he was 25 and she was 70. The author, born in Belgrade, Serbia, grew up listening to family tales about Vuka, who, in 1928, defied tradition and eloped with a much older man, Marko. He’d left his homeland decades earlier for California and eventually scored his own fortune in Alaska. After divorcing his first wife, he returned to the “Old Place” of Bay of Kotor, Montenegro, to find someone with whom to share his life. The timing was perfect, as Vuka had spent 10 years caring for her father and younger siblings after her mother’s death, and she was ready for escape and adventure. So began a love story that took her from the sunny Adriatic coast to the frigid, harsh Alaskan territory, which she embraced with enthusiasm. In 1942, she, Marko, and their four children moved to California, where Marko had begun his American dream, but they never gave up their Alaskan homestead. Even after Marko’s death in 1944, Vuka maintained their northern holdings, and by the ’70s, she was spending her summers up north. Although Radovic’s life work has been in international finance, he’s apparently inherited his family’s love of history. As a result, his slim memoir of his own family serves almost as well as a Slavic chronicle of times dating back to the Ottoman Empire and through two world wars. Overall, it is conversational in tone, with an occasional, pleasant quirkiness of phrasing as he traces the lineages, migrations, cultures, and religions of those who’ve populated the eastern side of the Adriatic Sea.
A personal recollection and tribute that’s loaded with engaging historical tidbits.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5049-7965-8
Page Count: 166
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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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