An engaging travel memoir.
A peripatetic teacher and writer’s reflections on a life spent seeking exotic experiences abroad and pondering the question: “[I]s there a right way and a wrong way to travel?”
Jones’ love of the foreign began when she studied Spanish in the fifth grade. At first, acquiring a second language was little more than a game, but by the time she was in college, the author realized that speaking Spanish facilitated travel experiences that made her feel “so alive [that she] almost felt high.” Her post-collegiate quest for the drug of exoticism took her to rural Costa Rica, where she worked for WorldTeach and learned to live on “lard and coffee.” The experience whetted her appetite for the unfamiliar to the point where she could not tolerate “a normal American life” grounded in routine. Her wanderings then took her to Bolivia. Faced with strong anti-American sentiment, Jones learned to own who and what she was “with eyes wide open” and a bottle of Coke in her hand. She returned to Costa Rica, where she helped build a school. After teaching in the United States, she traveled to Nicaragua, where she got heavily involved in the lives of the people she encountered. Work as a summer tour guide for American students in Cuba showed her that she took her freedom to wander for granted. Later stints as a Semester at Sea instructor taught her the impossibility of escaping what she was: a committed, though now temporarily settled, traveler with a touristic tendency to romanticize otherness. Rather than moralize about the right and wrong ways to travel, however, Jones celebrates the impulse to wander and recognizes the value in savoring vagabondage for the gift it ultimately is.
An engaging travel memoir.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-299-29570-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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