A moving, enlightening, and humorous memoir of the friendship between two women, aged 44 and 94. Komaiko is divorced and childless, the author of 18 children’s books, who, as a forever-young Dylan fan, fears aging and mortality. She finds that L.A., the “liposuction capital of the universe,” is the wrong place in which to hit middle age. Burnt out and despairing for her lost youth, she decides to look her future in the eye and volunteers to “adopt” an elderly woman in a senior residence, to whom she pays regular visits. She’s matched up with a blind woman in her 90s. But Adele is courageous, full of youthful enthusiasm and intelligence, and has a full “memory bank” that affords her a rich life of recollection: her mother worked with suffragette Susan B. Anthony and helped start the A&P company. But in this warm book about aging and friendship, Adele is most remarkable for reviving the spirits and youth of the woman who thought she would be comforting a lonely person waiting to die. Komaiko’s sense of humor prevents the memoir from warming one’s heart to the point of cardiac arrest, with earthy descriptions of the aged people she meets (she calls one woman “bulldozer in a muumuu—). The author begins by pitying and fearing these “people who had to give up their homes [and] waited to move into their plots,” but she ends up coming often to see her new friend, who serves as inspiration and surrogate grandma. The memoir turns maudlin by the end (“doing for others is what makes life worth it”), but by then, we—re every bit as hooked on Adele as Komaiko. The author rediscovers not only friendship, but romance as well. Komaiko has written a poignant memoir that turns despair into joy.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-58238-048-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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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