“Love the One You’re With” could be the theme song for these poignant, multilayered, pitch-perfect slices of life filled...
Love and loss form myriad combinations in these quirky, funny, ironic, and heartbreaking tales: a third collection from storywriter and novelist Thurm (The Clairvoyant, 1997, etc.).
A rabbi’s wife of ten years announces in front of his entire congregation that she’s leaving him, but when a new woman tempers his desperate yearning, the wife calls to ask for another chance. This dilemma, posed by opening story “Moonlight,” is merely a teaser for the stunning work that follows. “Earthbound” shows Walter grappling with his love for 19-year-old daughter Sunny, who has two children by a high-school sweetheart and now dates a loser who works in a pet shop. Mothers and daughters go at it in “Passenger” (12-year-old Lacey leaves her teacher/cab-driver mom to visit her dad and his new family in California) and in “Jumping Ship” (11-but-looks-14-year-old Noelle cares about nothing except calling her boyfriend while she and her single mother are visiting the grandparents in Florida). Mrs. Sugarman has paid for “Housecleaning” to welcome her asthmatic husband home from the hospital, but the odd couple she’s engaged arrive with their precocious child, fight bitterly, and reveal the most intimate details of their lives, forcing their employer to face her deepest desires. In “Personal Correspondence,” Sam hires lesbian Honey Rose to write thank-you notes after his wife leaves and winds up applying for the position of fathering her child. Thurm finds love everywhere and embraces all relationships: among parents and children, husbands and wives, friends, strangers, and lovers. Her protagonists are bad luck Charlies, likable and empathetic, fumbling through seemingly ordinary lives that Thurm’s deft hand raises to the extraordinary.
“Love the One You’re With” could be the theme song for these poignant, multilayered, pitch-perfect slices of life filled with humanity and hope despite frequent betrayals and abandonments.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-883285-22-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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