Novelist/painter Wharton, whose last book was the nonfiction account of his daughter's tragic death in a car accident (Ever After, 1995), here tackles the more pleasant topic of houseboating on the Seine, with unexpected results. A longtime resident of France, Wharton bought a houseboat ten miles west of Paris with the intention of living there with his schoolteacher wife and children. He fixed it up; it promptly sank. Thus follows a long struggle with this determinedly unfloatable vessel. First, Wharton is nearly skinned alive while attempting to clear the debris out of the sunken boat. (He neglected to wear a wetsuit while performing his rescue mission, unaware that the Renault auto plant upriver had been dumping sulfuric acid into the water.) Next, the vessel is resurrected by the colorful Teurnier brothers, second-generation experts in the field of raising sunken boats. Finally, the author attempts to make the listing wreck watertight—in vain. Teurniers to the rescue! Their ingenious solution: to take a filthy old oil barge—which Wharton and his game family spend three full weekends emptying of oil—and put the houseboat on top of it. The resulting monstrosity is made not merely livable but lovely after much time and hard work by the author, his crew, and the occasional Teurnier brother. Wharton expounds upon the details of these labors—measurements, techniques, and more—in great detail. Now, Wharton and his retired wife live on the boat full-time. It isn't maintenance-free, but it is, finally, charming. Readers expecting charm in this slim volume, however, should beware: Wharton's gritty and unembellished story—an amalgam of boatbuilding manual and memoir of expatriate life—is fascinating but not for the squeamish.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-55704-272-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Newmarket Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
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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