A choppy but impassioned chronicle powered by a perpetual quest for love.
A Buffalo-based writer’s affecting if protean memoir about Parisian life and love during the decade of liberation.
Stevenson’s life in western New York was a turbulent one. As a child, he was emotionally scarred by his blue-collar father, who continually told him he was worthless–he then watched his mother die of polio complications. Eager to dismiss him, his father shipped Stevenson off to a Connecticut boarding school at 13. Years later, the author left the East Coast, falling in love with a German teacher during a short-lived stint at a college in northern California. He returned to New York, but in short order his perpetually disappointed father tricked Stevenson into being committed to a psychiatric ward, convinced he was mentally unstable. Months passed and Stevenson was eventually deemed of sound mind. He hurriedly boarded an oil tanker where he worked until disembarking at Le Havre, France, and then moved to Paris, where freedom embraced his lonely, searching heart. Living a Francophile’s life, he barely subsisted on bread, cheese and cheap wine, living humbly in “something like a room in a cellar.” Stevenson traversed his new environs alone until encountering a young blond model named Cynthia, whom he’d seen wandering the halls of the same New York psychiatric ward he’d attended. Stevenson was instantly smitten, though soon received word from a relative of his acceptance into Harvard. But at 19, the allure of Paris drew him in further, despite the fact that Cynthia’s increasingly erratic behavior hinted at more serious problems. Neither her free-spirited good friends Ode, Charlie and Gloria nor a possible Vietnam War draft could divide them, but while their attraction deepened, minor indiscretions caused an undeniable rift. Though Paris offered all the charm, wonderment and romantic possibility Stevenson could have ever wanted, he departed brokenhearted. The memoir’s timeline evolves in fits and starts, but Stevenson eventually warms to the form and goes on to dictate a life of yearning love and personal enrichment. Its preciseness and melodramatic feel, however, strains its credibility.
A choppy but impassioned chronicle powered by a perpetual quest for love.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-595-486588
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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