Interestingly written throughout and brought into the present with a memorable visit to the arch-traveler Patrick Leigh...
A departure for a geopolitical gloom-and-doom Atlantic Monthly reporter: a book of travels to places where he’s not being shot at and whose inhabitants are not busily butchering one another.
This work is a curiosity in several respects. First, Kaplan (The Coming Anarchy, 2000, etc.) has dusted off journals from trips made as far back as the 1970s, when, fresh out of school and eager to live the Hemingway life, he headed for Europe to sharpen his aperçus. And so he did: “Marseilles taught me,” he writes in a nicely epigrammatic if self-evident turn, “that Mediterranean history was about power first, beauty second.” Second, he allows himself evident pleasure in seeing austere and difficult landscapes—an absence of gunfire, one supposes, will do that for a person—serving up crystalline sentences about “the sculpted, liver-hued steppe of northern Tunisia and the pinks of the southern deserts, with their vast blotches of salt” and oceangoing vessels that “slapped easily over the water, abounding with fish and sponges.” Elsewhere he ponders the deep history of Mediterranean lands, even engaging in brief flights of fancy, as when he imagines a moment with the well-traveled and learned Roman emperor Hadrian, who “would pause, perhaps, before a sculpture of Praxiteles, while remembering his dead lover Antinous.” Kaplan’s occasional Durrellesque, and presumably recent, grumblings about how places like the suburbs of Athens have been ruined by modernity (“sex shops and auto parts stores lined what in ancient times was the Sacred Way”) aside, this is at heart a young man’s story, sometimes self-conscious, sometimes a little too proud, one that takes pains to affirm that, as an adage has it, you can only know a foreign place after spending a winter there—as Kaplan has so often done, and in so many distant venues.
Interestingly written throughout and brought into the present with a memorable visit to the arch-traveler Patrick Leigh Fermor: a standout travel book, and a literate companion to places less remote than Kaplan now haunts.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-50804-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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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