A powerful antidote to Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck.
Entering her 60s with grace and equanimity, Lindbergh (No More Words: A Journal of My Mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 2001, etc.) has more important concerns than wrinkles or graying hair.
She writes engagingly about life on a farm in northern Vermont with its clutter, livestock, pets and resident birds, about her writing and her reading and about her family—both the one she grew up in and her present family. Readers may especially savor Lindbergh’s account of a solo stay on Florida’s Captiva Island if they’re familiar with Gift from the Sea, the bestselling meditation her mother wrote while living there, but no previous experience is necessary to enjoy her funny/sad revelations about her beloved former brother-in-law Noel Perrin and his quixotic relations with the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles. The book records two moments of particularly high drama. The first is the author’s diagnosis with a brain tumor that required surgery; excerpts from her journals from July 2006 to May 2007 effectively chart the emotional impact of her illness, also revealing that in the midst of it all she retained her sense of humor. Her delightful poem “My Little Brain Tumor” ends with the cheerful couplet, “It may have to go, though it’s shown little malice, / But if I can keep it, I’m calling it Alice.” The second shocker is the discovery long after Charles Lindbergh’s death that he had three secret families in Europe; during his frequent trips abroad in the 1950s and ’60s, he had conceived seven children. Lindbergh’s initial reaction to her father’s duplicity was anger, but her desire to know these hitherto unknown relatives proved stronger, leading to a moving account of her journey alone to Europe to meet five half-brothers, two half-sisters and their offspring.
A powerful antidote to Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-7511-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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