A cathartic, blisteringly candid family portrait of abuse, dysfunction, and eventual epiphany.
A Frenchwoman reflects on the familial abuse she witnessed and suppressed for years.
Kouchner’s moving, elegantly written memoir begins in 2017 with the unexpected death of her mother, Évelyne, with whom she’d been estranged. Though none of Évelyne’s five children were by her side when she died, they were reunited at the hospital, looking like a “slightly decrepit but reformed rock group.” The author chronicles her affluent upbringing, providing intriguing details about her father, Bernard, a diplomat, and free-spirited Évelyne, a feminist intellectual and political scientist who, in the 1960s, had a romance with Fidel Castro. Kouchner, a lecturer at the University of Paris, describes the bourgeoisie milieu of her large extended family, which also encompassed political dignitaries, and their carefree attitudes toward nudity, libertarianism, and a variety of social and cultural issues. The author is distinctly cleareyed when chronicling her family’s mental deterioration after the suicides of her grandparents. She is equally lucid in her depiction of her mother’s remarriage to her (unnamed) stepfather, a high-profile French intellectual and “combination of Michel Berger and Eddy Mitchell.” At their family home, he emerged as a rambunctious yet beloved and kind “constitutionalist.” However, his relationships to his stepchildren carried murkier undertones. In graphic chapters, Kouchner details the sexual abuse her twin brother endured at age 14, and she writes poignantly about how the suppressed guilt, “begat by lies” and shame she felt, bled into her adulthood and became “a new twinhood.” The secrecy clouded new relationships, while her brother, who went on to have “a truly brilliant career,” still suffered. “Over the slow process of rebuilding themselves, victims continue to believe they’re guilty for a long time,” writes Kouchner, “a classic process that I instinctively grasped and understood.” When she and her brother publicly broke their silence, the ensuing explosive ordeal scandalized French society enough to inspire new legislation on incest and rape.
A cathartic, blisteringly candid family portrait of abuse, dysfunction, and eventual epiphany.Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63542-212-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.
Portraits in a post-pandemic world.
After the Covid-19 lockdowns left New York City’s streets empty, many claimed that the city was “gone forever.” It was those words that inspired Stanton, whose previous collections include Humans of New York (2013), Humans of New York: Stories (2015), and Humans (2020), to return to the well once more for a new love letter to the city’s humanity and diversity. Beautifully laid out in hardcover with crisp, bright images, each portrait of a New Yorker is accompanied by sparse but potent quotes from Stanton’s interviews with his subjects. Early in the book, the author sequences three portraits—a couple laughing, then looking serious, then the woman with tears in her eyes—as they recount the arc of their relationship, transforming each emotional beat of their story into an affecting visual narrative. In another, an unhoused man sits on the street, his husky eating out of his hand. The caption: “I’m a late bloomer.” Though the pandemic isn’t mentioned often, Stanton focuses much of the book on optimistic stories of the post-pandemic era. Among the most notable profiles is Myles Smutney, founder of the Free Store Project, whose story of reclaiming boarded‑up buildings during the lockdowns speaks to the city’s resilience. In reusing the same formula from his previous books, the author confirms his thesis: New York isn’t going anywhere. As he writes in his lyrical prologue, “Just as one might dive among coral reefs to marvel at nature, one can come to New York City to marvel at humanity.” The book’s optimism paints New York as a city where diverse lives converge in moments of beauty, joy, and collective hope.
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781250277589
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
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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