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
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
