Readers with hectic lives may find the pace a bit slow, but the poetry in Badkhen’s prose demands that readers slow down and...
A journalist records her impressions of living with a group of nomads as they travel with their herds of cows back and forth across Mali.
Badkhen, who was born in Russia and has often written from war zones (The World Is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village, 2013, etc.), embedded herself with a Fulani family in West Africa whose members are still walking with their cows as their ancestors did thousands of years ago. On her journey, the author shared their lives, sleeping on a plastic tarp on the ground (sometimes with a child or a goat curled up next to her), cooking over a manure fire, eating millet and fish paste, churning buttermilk, bathing in a river, and learning their language. The measured pace of Fulani life, basically unchanged for millennia, served as a kind of balm for Badkhen, who was recovering from a recently ended, unhappy love affair. The Fulani cannot read the printed word, but they can read the sky, they know the seasons, and they cherish their cows. They told the author their stories and their myths, and she told them about the Big Bang and the long-ago migration of humans out of Africa. In lyrical and evocative prose, Badkhen writes of the beauty of the land and the sky and the grace and wisdom of the people. This is no Eden, however, for war planes fly overhead, climate change has brought long droughts, farms have been planted across the Fulani’s traditional travel routes, and modern technology is luring young men off to urban centers. The Fulani seem mostly unruffled by these threats to their lifestyle, however, adopting what suits them—e.g., plastic pails, flashlight batteries—keeping their faith in their cows, and synchronizing their lives with the seasons.
Readers with hectic lives may find the pace a bit slow, but the poetry in Badkhen’s prose demands that readers slow down and savor her gentle, elegant story.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59463-248-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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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