A curious and lyrical study that touches on many important ideas, but often only glancingly.
A recursive prose-poem contemplating addiction, dance, and the need for pathbreaking art.
In her latest, Fusselman (Savage Park: A Meditation on Play, Space, and Risk for Americans Who Are Nervous, Distracted, and Afraid to Die, 2015, etc.) focuses on breaking with artistic tradition, and structurally, she tries to practice what she preaches. Though she doesn’t play with line breaks, she often deploys a one-sentence-per-paragraph method that gives a poetic aura to her observations—e.g., “Now my mother is frail. Now my mother is getting smaller. Now my mother’s bed is moving and she cannot sleep.” The author uses the object of the title—an instrument that sounds when struck—as a slippery metaphor for her art and being, encompassing her risk-taking as a drinker to Tchaikovsky’s open-minded approach to composing The Nutcracker. The work is interspersed with imagery of mice, cockroaches, bunnies, and tiny vehicles, serving as allegories of drinking, the author’s tense relationship with her mother, and Tchaikovsky, too. Well, maybe; if it all doesn’t entirely make sense, that serves her purpose just fine: “Why can’t more authors just abandon their lumbering storylines halfway through and move on to something more interesting, like dancing candy?” It’s not a hollow provocation: The best pieces of the work explore how The Nutcracker, now a drowsy Yuletide warhorse, was a radical creative act, inviting a rare dreamlike perspective to the stage, envisioning a blend of word and movement that, one interviewee tells Fusselman, died at the hands of the modernists. The author’s layering of her thematic ideas gives the book the feel of a mood piece—like a Steve Reich composition where riffs phase in and out—which makes it a pleasure on a sensual level. However, because she never lingers long on any one idea, readers may feel that there is much more to be said about motherhood, alcoholism, art, and physicality than is being delivered.
A curious and lyrical study that touches on many important ideas, but often only glancingly.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-56689-513-2
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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