An exhaustive and exhausting autobiography of Weiner's life to date.
A bestselling author reveals everything about her life.
Novelist Weiner (Who Do You Love, 2015, etc.) gives readers an in-depth look into her life in these nonfiction essays, the subjects of which have provided much of the fodder for her popular books. Going as far back as when her grandparents met, the author provides an overly detailed timeline of her life. For those who want to know how and when Weiner began writing; what grade school and high school were like for an overweight introvert; why her mother came out as a lesbian and the effect that had on the author; her college life, including the classes she took; her ambitions during and after college; the boyfriends she had and the lovesickness she felt when they left her; how she felt about being a mother and how returning to work when her first daughter was very young affected her; the author’s thoughts on food and weight gain and loss; how her books became so successful; and a host of other minutiae, look no further. The essays are honest, sometimes funny, and sometimes emotional, and they help to show what life can be like for a woman and/or a Jewish woman, but there's so much packed into the book that it becomes overwhelming. Weiner's ability to recall physical details about her 8-year-old classmates or the books she read starting at age 4 may seem impressive, but it's those same details that eventually bog readers down. For Weiner’s many fans, the book will answer the question of “where does she find her writing material?” Readers of her novels and those who like knowing the intimate, personal lives of popular celebrities will find plenty to absorb in this fat volume.
An exhaustive and exhausting autobiography of Weiner's life to date.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2340-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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