A poignant and forthright tale of a rugged journey by an extraordinarily gifted writer—who may be borrowing from her...
A memoir that floats like a sad song, with its themes the effervescence of champagne and the flatness of the morning after.
Cheever (A Woman’s Life, 1994) has written about her life and her family’s before, notably in Home Before Dark, her memoir of her father, John. This book changes the angle of the mirror, focusing on the role of alcohol in her growing up, her affairs and marriages, the birth of her two children, and her work. Drinking was her heritage: The ship on which her ancestors came to the New World carried “three times as much beer as water, along with ten thousand gallons of wine.” Her grandmother taught her how to mix martinis when she was six years old. In her family’s suburban household, drinks were taken before, during, and after dinner and at Sunday brunch. In college, and later in the Deep South during the civil rights summers of 1965 and 1966, she found herself a part of “a bunch of us kids from Ivy League colleges . . . [who] went to parties and drank a lot. . . . “ Cheever, now fiftysomething, rafted through life on a river of alcohol; her pain was dulled, but so were her judgment and memory. She accompanied her father to AA meetings, yet even though the stories told sometimes paralleled hers, there was always a detail “too bizarre” to let her label herself as an alcoholic. Her two children finally moved her to stop drinking, and a new belief in God allowed her to succeed. “They say that drinking is a low-level search for God,” Cheever avers; now new—or restored—faith in God has reportedly moved her to another level.
A poignant and forthright tale of a rugged journey by an extraordinarily gifted writer—who may be borrowing from her father’s story to define her own life.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-80432-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
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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