Rating: 
Summary: Therapy made public
Review: As the current advertising campaign for the Marines states, "If you wrote a book about your life, would anyone want to read it?" Well, that's the question that kept nudging me as I read Sherwin Nuland's account of his life with his father. I was waiting for something to happen and it never did. Here is another book about a dysfunctional Jewish family, with all the guilt, death, hardship, illness, poverty, etc. you've come to expect from this type of account. However, it goes nowhere. It strikes me as the type of book that was very cathartic to write and incredibly important to the author to look within himself and dredge up - something he admits that he has avoided for his entire life until now. However, unless you are trying to address the same issues with your own dysfunctional upbringing, it is not an interesting story. Actually, I found Dr. Nuland's account of his own bouts of clinical depression in the first pages much more interesting than the rest of the book. To be fair I will add in support of the book that it is well written with flowing text and shows off the author's large vocabulary.
Rating: 
Summary: Long Day's Journey into Light
Review: Great drama has character development, change, and carries the viewer to a climax where struggles come to some kind of resolution. One of the amazing properties of this book is how well the structure of drama is played out. Appreciation of sunlit heights is sweeter after slogging through enough rock strewn trenches. The attentive reader will be rewarded. In fact the cinematic climax would be hard to accept without a realization this is not fiction but fact. The drama here is not contrived, invented, or imagined - it arises naturally from the complexities of life. How nice for the author that subsequent chapters, unwritten, came out so fine!
Rating:
Summary: A Blessing
Review: I had read How We Die, so I was anxious to read another book by this author. I tried reading this a few months ago and found it too bleak. Yet I picked it up again, and understood finally why it seemed bleak. It is a true story of life for an immigrant who suffers tragedies and losses and yet perseveres to eventually show love to his son and pride in his accomplishments. I almost cried at the end, even though I knew his father would die at the end of the book. It's a book of struggle to find one's own way. And it says a great deal about family influences. Well worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Moving, sensitive, beautifully written
Review: I love this book. Dr. Nuland takes you on a journey with him to his past and his family, in particular his relationship with his father. He tells his story in a manner that is simple, clear, yet deeply moving. His characters are real people who I really cared about while I was reading. I've read his previous books and was very impressed; this one is even better. His description of his severe depression was gripping. How I wish I could describe mine as well. Thank you, Dr. Nuland for a heart-warming book.
Rating:
Summary: Something was missing
Review: I started reading the book and was thrilled by the content and writing style. It started out very strongly talking about his adult mental illness and then went back to his childhood dominated by loss. I could vividly picture Jewish New york for those in poverty. Although the childhood story was powerful and beautifully written, I was shocked that at the end it left too many unanswered questions about his life.
Rating:
Summary: Something was missing
Review: I started reading the book and was thrilled by the content and writing style. It started out very strongly talking about his adult mental illness and then went back to his childhood dominated by loss. I could vividly picture Jewish New york for those in poverty. Although the childhood story was powerful and beautifully written, I was shocked that at the end it left too many unanswered questions about his life.
Rating:
Summary: Family Dynamics Woven Into a Powerful Narrative
Review: In 1994, when DR Nuland published his "Best Seller". "How We Die", I wrote a review for a Journal. As a surgeon, I was not impressed with explication of the disease processes that commonly caused death and the organization of the material; but I distinctly remember giving Nuland high praise for "his literary facility with the narrative in the case histories and the poignancy of his boyhood family life".
This same literary power is revisited in "spades" as he deftly threads the emotions of ethnicity, bizarre family dynamics, guilt, failures, despair, poverty, illnesses, hatred, rage, control and triumph into the fabric of a powerful narrative. The chronology conveniently saves the denouement of the malady that causes the Father's problems to almost the end.
The author's triumph in being appointed Chief Surgical Resident brought redemption for the father's failures as well as a modicum of reconcilliation and (unexpressed) love to the father-son rapport.
The author's wish that his father would die so that he would not cause him further embarassment perhaps emanated the ethical guilt to be expunged by re-visiting the father-son dynamics in the writing of this book. The moral honesty with which he wrote of this relationship had to have been very painful for the author, as it seemed palpable to me in the reading(a mark of good literature).
This is definitely Nuland's best literary work.
Rating:
Summary: Powerful and depply moving
Review: In an earlier book, Dr. Nuland told us How We Die. That book gave me some understand and comfort following my father's death. In this beautifully-written and heart-wrenching memoir, Dr. Nuland tries to come to terms with his own father's death and in doing so, managed to exorcise some demons.
This is a very brave memoir in that the author spares no one, including himself. It is at once brutally honest (sometimes so much so, that I had to stop reading) and incisive. His prose style--unusual for a doctor--is lyrical and succinct. He tells his story from a uniquely Jewish perspective (naturally) and so I wondered if readers with other religious affiliations would respond in the same way. Perhaps it doesn't matter. The book is a winner and I am enriched from having read it.
Rating:
Summary: Powerful and depply moving
Review: In an earlier book, Dr. Nuland told us How We Die. That book gave me some understand and comfort following my father's death. In this beautifully-written and heart-wrenching memoir, Dr. Nuland tries to come to terms with his own father's death and in doing so, managed to exorcise some demons.
This is a very brave memoir in that the author spares no one, including himself. It is at once brutally honest (sometimes so much so, that I had to stop reading) and incisive. His prose style--unusual for a doctor--is lyrical and succinct. He tells his story from a uniquely Jewish perspective (naturally) and so I wondered if readers with other religious affiliations would respond in the same way. Perhaps it doesn't matter. The book is a winner and I am enriched from having read it.
Rating:
Summary: Honest and Touching
Review: The hardest part of any memoir is for the author to honestly describe his or her own lowest moments, the sort when we hate them and feel sympathy for those they hurt. On these grounds alone, one must admire Nuland's honest assessment of his own situation growing up. The embarrassment children of immigrants feel at their parent's attachment to their old lives and inability to adapt to the new. The desire of the new generation to loose their ancestry and become truly American, contrasting with the older generations loss at never truly fitting in. Nuland's account is touching and honest. One feels for all of his characters deeply and cannot help but cry as many of the aspirations they share also pull them apart. Nuland's work can be read on two levels. The first, as an account of a particular group of immigrants, with all of their pain and joy brought to the fore through wonderfully poignant writing. Second, one sees how the immigrant experience transcends any particular group, and that what ever their point of origin, all immigrants share common aspirations and fears when they arrive on these shores. On either level, this brief page-turner is well worth your time.
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