These well-turned vignettes of a transplanted cityman won’t bump E.B. White or Noel Perrin from the top shelf, but they have...
Fast-track editor Alexander downshifts to the back-road life of a Maine farmer, though he keeps his journalist’s pen busy.
As a young showbiz editor at Variety and People, he already possessed considerable personal insight: “I was apprenticing to be an asshole.” So Alexander and his family upped and moved north to Maine and a farm that had seen better times. Short descriptions of his days, originally published in the Portland Phoenix, range over subjects from burning the blueberry patch to contra dancing. The author is the proverbial rube in the land of hardscrabble survivors, picking up scraps of wisdom, though he feels he will never be accepted. Yet, between magazine assignments (which come in an enviable horn of plenty), Alexander works hard at connecting with his new home; he might forget to engage the mower blades when cutting—or, rather, not cutting—the lawn, but he will also plant and sow, fight the good fight against a strip-mine proposal, and even run for selectman, an act of considerable jeopardy to his ego. At times he can be sanctimonious (“Farmers also go to college these days. The nation’s agricultural schools, supported heavily by agribusiness, teach them how to be profitable [but] there’s no textbook on how to hose out the sheep shed without disturbing the robin’s nest”), but he can also admit his inadequacies. The citizenry keep him up to speed, whether it’s the “septic analyst” who advises a new system after he “noticed some black gunk oozing up from the ground. It was crude but definitely not oil,” or the neighbor who counsels him to simply accept his primitive wood-and-gas stove. “My mother had one of those stoves,” says Ken. “Sure, every now and then she’d blow the doors off the house, but who gives a shit?”
These well-turned vignettes of a transplanted cityman won’t bump E.B. White or Noel Perrin from the top shelf, but they have an enduring simplicity and allure.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7867-1412-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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