A good thing this “toxic bachelor” isn’t looking for absolution—he won't likely be getting it from any but those initiated...
Mock-serious confessional memoir from journalist Marin, who displays an overdeveloped sense of entitlement and appreciation of his own sly humor as he attempts an ironical, insightful picaresque.
As his narrative begins, Marin is on the prowl for sex, having recently split with his wife of three years. He appears to be a fumbling, no-score kind of guy, but all too soon he’s achieved a “string of meaningless encounters.” He’s as ready as the next guy “to summon the Bachelor Beelzebub and bargain my soul for some Faustian kicks,” a stance that quickly gets tiresome. So do his would-be pithy observations: “Relationships are all variations on a school-yard dare: ‘I'll show you mine, you show me yours’ ”; “No guy wants to be alone. We want to be with other women. Then when we're out with other women we want to be alone”; “If only hothouse flowers didn't demand constant climate control”; and the running joke, “There are two kinds of women . . .” Marin’s prose suffers from a crabbed spontaneity, he provides too much detail, and many of the jokes lack enough spark to ignite a smudge fire. (Those years at the New York Times Sunday Styles section seem to have given him an inflated opinion of his own wit.) The author can, as he freely admits, be a lowlife, and when he says, “I'd seen flashes of neediness, humorlessness, and pretension. Which brought out in me flashes of disdain, acerbity, and superciliousness,” he might well be talking to the mirror. It isn't a big surprise that his most honest moments come when confessing his warped behavior to a purely platonic female friend; what does come as a surprise is how sensitively he writes of his father’s death.
A good thing this “toxic bachelor” isn’t looking for absolution—he won't likely be getting it from any but those initiated in his approach.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2003
ISBN: 0-7868-6882-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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