An evocative record of a year in the woods and an interesting study in enacting one’s beliefs.
A restless city poet recounts her experiment with country living.
The idea to swim against the “consumptive current” and move west came to Minato (The Wider Lens, 2004) during a Chicago traffic jam. Increasingly bothered by the global impact her metropolitan existence was having on the environment, the poet packed up and headed to Oregon for graduate school. But after eight years, even Eugene proved too urban for her, and she moved again, this time to a ten-square-foot cabin that was part of an eight-acre commune on Siesta Lane in the relative wilds of Rainbow Valley, Ore. Her memoir, a veritable menagerie of thoughts, observations, photos, poems and lovely pen-and-ink drawings by Muir, is the result of Minato’s year or so away, where she discovered as much about herself as the wonders of nature. “Not so simple—simple living,” she realized early on. Characterizing each of her fellow Siesta Lane residents, the author doesn’t neglect herself, saying she’s a “single woman with ninety-eight part-time jobs trying to figure out how she connects to the greater forces of the universe and to the tiny earwigs that hide in the curled-up seed heads of Queen Anne’s lace.” Part of this volume’s charm lies in its somewhat fractured composition, which mirrors the author’s state of mind during this transitional period. Short chapters hop from “Incubation” to “Freaks” to “July” to “The Garden,” while loosely conveying the sense of time’s passage as Minato adjusted to her rustic domestic situation. Living without many modern conveniences—for example, only the commune’s main building had a kitchen and running water—led her to provocative conclusions: “For us it appears to primarily be the mind that evolves, and we then cater our surroundings to our weakening bodies.” She took some radical actions as well, such as getting rid of her cat after he brought home one too many birds.
An evocative record of a year in the woods and an interesting study in enacting one’s beliefs.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60239-328-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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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