This contrived memoir might have been a mildly entertaining blog or magazine article. For adult women without a single...
Tiresome chronicle of the author’s 52 friend dates in one year, and the psychology of friendship.
Once the golden glow of a new marriage settled into a daily routine, Bertsche realized she needed more than the constant love and attention of her husband. “But when I need to talk my feelings to death,” she writes, “really sit and analyze why I am confused/lonely/ecstatic, he’s just not up to it.” Additionally, “in your late twenties, friend-making is not the natural process is used to be. In fact, as it turns out, I’ve completely forgotten how to do it.” Stringing together her encounters with potential friends, Bertsche drops in snippets of scientific research concerning the nature of friendship along with anything else she thinks is relevant, including breast cancer, depression and her interviews with professionals regarding her friend quest. Along the way, the author experimented with online friending sites and experienced book clubs, a wellness cleanse at her yoga studio and a flash mob in her dance school. When she heard about a local friend matchmaker service, she signed up. “If I were more narcissistic,” she writes, “I’d think the local Chicago area was learning about my search and creating companies just for me.” Ultimately, her search succeeded. She was a better friend. She was more adventurous, independent and less naïve about the “idea of the attached-at-the-hip BFF.” She adhered to conventional rules of etiquette (many of which are generally learned in grade school), such as not interrupting others when they are speaking. Essentially, she became a happier, nicer version of herself.
This contrived memoir might have been a mildly entertaining blog or magazine article. For adult women without a single friend, maybe some of this recycled information will help.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-345-52494-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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