A searching, occasionally profound collection/memoir.
A United Nations staffer and novelist meditates on the question of “how…the life we live relate[s] to lives we might have lived or ought to have lived.”
When Browner (Everything Happens Today, 2011, etc.) turned 50, “thoughts of the road not taken” began to weigh on his mind. He had lived a bohemian lifestyle and committed himself to pursuing literary greatness throughout most of his 20s. But as he neared 30, he found himself drifting into what became a successful career as an international civil servant. In this collection of seven essays, Browner takes a critical look at his existential malaise as well as the motivations and choices that have defined his life. He examines the romanticism and self-involvement that governed his youthful thinking and caused him to scorn what Roger Shattuck called “recognized channels of accomplishment.” A strong but unacknowledged need for the familial tranquility the author did not have in childhood guided him toward a more conventional life as a husband, father, and provider. Writing became a secondary pursuit, but its presence in his life and the unlived possibilities it seemed to suggest haunted him. Literarily informed and philosophically engaged, Browner’s essays are infused with a rueful ambivalence as well as an all-too-human longing for possible pasts and futures. Yet in no way does he regret his choices. Maturity has allowed the author to see that at any given point, “there is not one future ahead of us, but multiple futures.” Creating alternate storylines for our lives is really about “creating a universe that will allow us to be our best selves.” Since choices have consequences, finding happiness means accepting those consequences as part of a process of personal growth. As for the conflicts that arise as we distinguish between what we need and what we desire and then prioritize them, they are what ultimately “give the game its tension” and make life meaningful.
A searching, occasionally profound collection/memoir.Pub Date: June 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-227569-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper Wave
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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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