“It is enough, it is plenty, to be a small parcel of Nature’s becoming,” writes Daniel. In this reflective and polished...
Poet, essayist, and memoirist Daniel (Looking After, 1996, etc.) charts his emergence as a writer and environmentalist.
Investigating his interest in and bright sympathy with the natural world, Daniel discovers glimmerings during his youth “in what were then the semirural outskirts of Washington, D.C.,” where he went fishing, observed the shivering mystery of a rumbling underground stream, and dodged hail the size of grapes. By high school, psychedelics were more his cup of tea, but he also went climbing up and down the West Coast. “It turned out that climbing, like fishing before it, had in a way prepared me for creative writing. . . . I knew what is was to labor in tense uncertainty, hoping that one move would lead me to the next.” His writing was helped along by Daniel’s study of Gary Snyder’s compact, tough, and focused poems, as well as Wallace Stegner’s grave, lively works about the western wilderness. Loren Eiseley gave Daniel a creation narrative he could accept. Aldo Leopold and Wendell Berry taught him something about being a member of the living community. William Stafford counseled him to give “sustained attention to the promptings of language” and willingly follow where they lead. In Daniel’s case, they led to exploring the whole idea of home, in particular his home in western Oregon among the trees, berries, and incandescent green. Yet writing about nature can also divide him from it, he observes: “The problem may not be that language falsifies experience . . . but that to one extent or another language can come to replace experience.” Spending time outdoors is a counterweight, as is defense of the environment, though the author urges conservationists to “more forthrightly acknowledge our own implication in and insulation from natural resource economies.”
“It is enough, it is plenty, to be a small parcel of Nature’s becoming,” writes Daniel. In this reflective and polished text, he has very much insinuated himself into the process.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-57131-266-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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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