Reading like notes toward a more in-depth book on train travel, the narrative requires fuller-fleshed characters and...
A collection of an Italian journalist’s railway journeys.
Severgnini (La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind, 2006, etc.) clearly loves trains, as these scattershot accounts of his railroad excursions attest. He spent his honeymoon on the Trans-Siberian Express, which runs more than 5,500 miles, and, due to a booking error, they shared a second-class sleeping compartment with two Russian strangers. “I’m not an idiot,” the author insists. “I had reserved a first class compartment so as to be alone with my bride but the Russians screwed us.” Recalling this “remarkable journey,” he writes, “if your wife is still smiling when you reach Beijing station, she’s an extraordinary woman, and you did the right thing by marrying her.” Unfortunately, readers will manage barely a chuckle, and there isn’t much detail on what makes the journey remarkable. The book is essentially an extended journal. Severgnini dismisses each day of the trip with little more than a few paragraphs, and he compresses his accounts of the other excursions to a page or two of matter-of-fact encounters and experiences. The opening is one of the longer trips (and chapters): The author details his cross-country trip through the United States with his 20-year-old son, introducing him to many places the author was revisiting, having seen them first when he was living and working in America. Yet the pair traveled almost half of the 5,000 miles by car or bus, and the son was of an age where he and has father didn’t talk much. Some of the author’s excursions included a video crew, and these pieces read like program notes. A couple of the trips paired Severgnini with a German counterpoint, leading to a compare and contrast of cultures. One purported to be taking the pulse of America before an election, while another did the same for Italy. “I decide to buttonhole the entire carriage…for an impromptu opinion poll: how’s Italy doing?” The response is inconclusive.
Reading like notes toward a more in-depth book on train travel, the narrative requires fuller-fleshed characters and experiences.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59240-872-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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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