If you finish this brilliantly realized book thinking you need to own more books, you’re to be forgiven. A wonderful...
Memoir of Jewish intellectual life and universal history alike, told through a houseful of books, their eccentric collectors, and the rooms in which they dwelled.
Chimen Abramsky (1916-2010) and his wife, Miriam, were easily overlooked people who made a long life in a brick house in North London. But they were giants of a kind, for what a house it was: sprawling and ramshackle but jammed to the rafters with books and papers, serving as “one of left-wing London’s great salons.” In this entertaining, deeply learned book, Sasha Abramsky (Writing/Univ. of California, Davis; The American Way of Poverty, 2013, etc.) adds materially to Chimen and Mimi’s 20,000 volumes. On another level, the book, like that grand library, is a narrative of the broad sweep of Jewish diaspora history. Chimen was a collector of useful books. For him, that doctrine of usefulness embraced the works of Karl Marx in explaining how the modern world works, Charles Darwin in explaining how life evolved, Maimonides in explaining how life should be lived, and so forth. Chimen had a sticky mind that remembered everything, and he made connections among all the things stored within: Abramsky the grandson remembers marveling when, as a very old man, Chimen, who “had almost certainly never once kicked a ball,” was able to discourse smartly on David Beckham’s career prospects simply by virtue of all the oddments he had collected about him. As the story unfolds, we follow Chimen and Mimi from room to room, most of them colonized by the former as the children grew up and moved out, and we hear their stories: of Chimen’s angry annoyance when someone said Hitler was crazy, which “gave Hitler and the Germans a free pass,” of the couple’s rich minds and witty conversations, and of the thought of vicariously “touching a book that Marx had owned and commented on.”
If you finish this brilliantly realized book thinking you need to own more books, you’re to be forgiven. A wonderful celebration of the mind, history, and love.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59017-888-1
Page Count: 344
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
PROFILES
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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