A poetic, insightful examination of human connections and unexpected intimacy.
According to this engaging book, building personal connections takes courage, but it’s worth the effort.
In the 21st century, many of us have forgotten how to forge meaningful relationships with those outside our inner circles. However, while we might be out of practice, we can rediscover how to do it. This is the underlying message of this book, a textured exploration of the myriad forms of human contact. Field, a performance artist based in London, has participated in events that have been surprising, comedic, and poignant, and he has drawn crucial lessons from his experiences. The author’s essays cover a wide range of topics, from the intimacy of a haircut to the collective joy of a dance party to the importance of holding hands. Field believes that humans have a basic need for contact, and the isolation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic was psychologically damaging at both the social and personal levels. With the pandemic waning, it’s the perfect time to reconsider our interactions, renew our relationships, and be open to the wider world. Field also shows how the move away from face-to-face interaction was underway before the pandemic. Though he appreciates the utility of smartphones and Zoom, he is clear that we should not let them take over our lives or replace the nuanced warmth of conversation. Deepening a friendship is something that enriches life, but the other ingredient is being willing to venture into the unknown by connecting with strangers. Field discusses how temporary communities suddenly form, such as when sheltering from a rainstorm or with a spontaneous snowball fight. He also looks at cinema audiences at a horror movie, showing how catharsis, like many things, is better when it’s shared. In fact, the author recommends you give this book to a stranger after reading it—an appropriate conclusion for a quietly inspiring book.
A poetic, insightful examination of human connections and unexpected intimacy.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781324036586
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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