A moving family history researched with dedication and completed with a granddaughter’s love.
Unearthing her grandparents’ mysterious 50-year estrangement forms the foundation for translator and editor Mouillot’s memoir.
From the time she was a young girl, the author understood that she came from a turbulent family of Holocaust survivors and that her estranged grandparents’ relationship was odd. The family’s emotional terrain consisted of “fights and bitterness, illness and injury, trauma, bad memories, and crazy grudges.” Her mother knew little about their relationship, except for the fact that they hadn’t spoken in almost 40 years. As an adolescent, Mouillot had been close to her grandmother, but it was not until she was 14 that she visited her difficult grandfather alone in Switzerland for the first time. After this visit, the author initially comprehended the volatility surrounding her grandparents’ relationship. The combination of her grandfather’s strong negative feelings for his ex-wife and her grandmother’s vague responses to Mouillot’s inquiries about their relationship prompted more questions. Through convoluted conversations with her mother and grandparents, the author began piecing together the puzzle of their traumatic daily lives. Her grandmother was a physician during the war, and her grandfather served as an interpreter at the Nuremberg trials. After they met, they married, had a baby and moved to a house in the countryside in southern France. Putting together the family story involved many discussions, delving into old family letters and archival research; the process took Mouillot more than 10 years. Before completing the family story, her grandfather lost his memory to dementia, but her grandmother was able to read an early version of the book. “While I was trying to remember,” writes the author, “Grandma was urging me to forget, to put it down on paper and get on with the labor or living.”
A moving family history researched with dedication and completed with a granddaughter’s love.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0804140645
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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