Anyone who has ever had a family or a computer can relate to Goodell’s story.
Techie journalist Goodell (The Cyberthief and the Samurai, not reviewed) presents a touching family portrait as well as an acute look at the social implications of the information age.
Goodell’s story (named for his bright California hometown) opens in 1979, when, after 21 years of marriage, Goodell’s mother tells her children that she and their father are getting divorced. This was no crisis to Goodell, who recalls thinking that “divorce felt more like a step into the modern world than the breaking of a sacred covenant.” But the split proves to be the first of many dark clouds in his family’s future, and Goodell is much more of a family guy than this initial reaction suggests. He documents and tries to reason with the slow breakdown of a family he loves dearly—a grandfather who valued engineering over family, a father destroyed by divorce, a mother who learns computer code and remarries, a brother ravaged by drugs and alcohol, and a sister struggling amidst the confusion. Goodell also speaks sincerely of his own rebellions, passions, and adventures—and of his love-hate relationship with technology. He races bikes, works a short stint at a company known by the “funny name” of Apple Computer, leaves home to work in a Lake Tahoe casino, discovers love and journalism, and continually worries about his family. Founded on family history and set in the accelerating world of Silicon Valley, Goodell’s story is linked meaningfully to the past and the future in his attempt to explain addiction, disease, desire, jealousy, and regret by finding “the faulty line of code that causes the whole system to crash.” And, in trying (unsuccessfully) to explain it all through scientific logic, he proves that love is not a quantifiable entity.
Anyone who has ever had a family or a computer can relate to Goodell’s story.Pub Date: July 17, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-45698-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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
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
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