In an age when the number of readers is declining, a delightful book like this might just snare a few new recruits.
A self-help book about books.
Publishing executive Schwalbe had a bestseller with The End of Your Life Book Club (2012), a poignant memoir about growing up in a reading family and a two-person book club: the author and his ill mother. This follow-up employs a similar approach, with him discovering all kinds of books or poems “to help me make sense of the world, to help me become a better person.” His “manifesto for readers” is not about his favorite books but those that helped him when he had a need. Written in a chatty, conversational style, the book is thematically organized by a wide variety of needs: slowing down, searching, trusting, napping, praying, etc. One book’s shadow looms large: Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living—“there is no book I turn to more often.” It “lives up to the promise of its title.” When Schwalbe feels like quitting, he turns to “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” the “patron saint of quitters.” He revisits David Copperfield, a “miracle of a book,” whenever he’s gone too long without remembering another David, a “beautiful, vibrant friend” who died. From Stuart Little, Schwalbe learns that, in the words of E.B. White, “questing is more important than finding.” Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train “gives us the tools we need to try to figure out whom we can trust,” while Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran is a “book about books changing lives, and it’s a book that has saved lives.” Schwalbe doesn’t go into that much detail about each book; rather, he leads by example, focusing on a book (Gift from the Sea, The Taste of Country Cooking, Zen in the Art of Archery) in the context of something specific and personal that happened to him.
In an age when the number of readers is declining, a delightful book like this might just snare a few new recruits.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-35354-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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