Promising moments, but Utah wilderness lovers will want to stick to Edward Abbey and Ellen Meloy.
A sort-of-Mormon tree-hugger wrestles to fit in with her less enlightened neighbors at the end of the world.
Or close to it: Once you leave the civilization of Blanding and Monticello, Utah, and head west up the hill to Cedar Mesa, you’re in the land of juniper trees, Anasazi ruins and ghosts. There Irvine, a champion rock climber and wilderness advocate, having married a like-minded attorney, makes her home early on in the pages of this memoir. There she learns how to negotiate daily life among Mormon cowboys who are inclined to aim their pickups at anyone on a bicycle, assuming—correctly—that only an outsider would choose such transport. Wrestling with demons, chief among them unresolved troubles with her now-deceased but always absent father, Irvine knows how to talk the talk but doesn’t walk the walk. She is inclined to note, for instance, that DNA evidence proves that the Indians and the Hebrews are genetically quite distinct, the Book of Mormon notwithstanding, while advocating grazing controls in overgrazed country whose rancher inhabitants insist that they’re the only real conservationists. There are some well-handled episodes here, as when Irvine wistfully wishes that one of those ranchers would invite her out to his spread for a civilized conversation and a burger: “The rancher will see that I’m not so bad, that perhaps we agree on more than he realized. He’ll promise to talk to other cowboys, tell them the tree-huggers that have come to town aren’t so different after all.” (No such luck.) But there are also some overwrought, and self-important stretches, and too many instances of treading into emotional territory owned by Terry Tempest Williams and Jana Richman, whose Riding in the Shadow of the Saints: A Woman’s Story of Motorcycling the Mormon Trail (2005) better handles the father-daughter conflict in the Mormon context.
Promising moments, but Utah wilderness lovers will want to stick to Edward Abbey and Ellen Meloy.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-86547-703-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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
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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