A profound, moving treatise on finding God in gardening.
A soul-searching memoir and travelogue about finding God in the food produced by community agriculture.
Bahnson (co-author: Making Peace with the Land: God's Call to Reconcile with Creation, 2012) was the founder and director of Anathoth, a rich, verdant acre of land owned by his church and used to grow food for its North Carolina community. After several years there, the author was exhausted from defending the project to church members who failed to understand that “Anathoth was not just a hunger relief ministry. It was a whole new way to be a church.” So the author, his wife and their children left the farm for their own piece of land; but once there, Bahnson still felt something was missing from his life. “What does it mean to follow God?” he asked. “How should I live my life? And what does all this have to do with the soil, the literal ground of my existence?” To answer these questions, Bahnson immersed himself in the connections between Judeo-Christian faiths and the burgeoning food movement, while also reflecting upon his life in God. Along the way, he visited a Trappist abbey and Pentecostal organic farmers and celebrated Sukkot on a Jewish farm. Whether he is describing making compost (“I became a priest dispensing the elements to a microbial congregation”) or a “devious, childlike” nonagenarian who doled out “the worst titty-twister [he’d] had since fourth grade,” Bahnson’s lively prose is spiritual without ever being preachy or heavy-handed, and the overall effect is akin to reading a Wendell Berry essay, if Berry also had a sense of humor. Bahnson’s story and its message is constantly, deeply thought-provoking, claiming that working the land with others “reveals the joyful messiness of human life where we find others who need us, and whom we need in return. How we hunger is who we are.”
A profound, moving treatise on finding God in gardening.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6330-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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
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
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