A pungent evocation of the conflict and compromise between tradition and innovation that define modern urbanism.
After taking a tart look at her adopted country in La Seduction (2011, etc.), Sciolino shows a softer side in this affectionate portrait of her Ninth Arrondissement neighborhood.
Not that the veteran foreign correspondent for the New York Times and Newsweek indulges in unbridled sentimentality. Yes, the author fell in love with her apartment when she walked into its cobblestoned courtyard and “was transported back to the first half of the nineteenth century,” and she praises the shop-lined rue des Martyrs 500 feet from her front door because it “has retained the feel of a small village.” But in an early chapter lamenting the closing of a family-run fish store, Sciolino acknowledges that the frozen fish sold for half the price at the local supermarket is actually pretty good. She still misses the chance to linger and talk fish at the old poissonnerie. She relishes the formal intimacy of relationships with the merchants, and her brisk, lucid prose conveys the charm of unspoken rules that govern all interactions: newcomers must prove they know the code before they too get the freshest piece of fish cut in the back room or the loan of a book they can’t afford to buy. Sciolino understands this mindset, because her Sicilian-American grandfather had the same distrust of strangers. Over the course of five years she became accepted enough to throw the wildly successful party bringing together the street’s two halves: the more gentrified lower portion in the Ninth, and the tawdrier, cheaper stretch that runs through Montmartre. “Le Potluck” closes the book on an elegiac note, but chapters in between also chronicle darker moments: a columnist who survived the January 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo lives on the rue des Martyrs, and a high school down the way annually commemorates 19 students and one teacher killed by the Nazis.
A pungent evocation of the conflict and compromise between tradition and innovation that define modern urbanism.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24237-9
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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