When the intent is not to elicit our admiration, the effect can be striking.
A skydiver, hiker, pilot, teacher, and freelance writer watches migrating birds and remembers important moments and people in her life.
“I have always known a wild bird lives inside of me,” writes Batterson, explaining the wanderlust that periodically compels her to visit the far reaches of the globe, to jump from airplanes in thunderstorms, to leave her husband and other quotidian commitments to be alone with her thoughts, her battered VW bus, and her humming laptop. Batterson can dazzle with her adventurous and usually intrepid spirit. Although her memoir floats on the surface of a recent road trip she took to see large bird migrations (especially in Pennsylvania and Kansas), she is more interested in what lies beneath. Like nesting dolls, her narratives sometimes contain flashbacks within flashbacks. And so we learn about her first solo flight, about a youthful cross-country drive, about “punching a cloud” with a fellow skydiver, about trekking in Nepal. On her journey she visits old friends and family—and takes a few potshots at her first husband (“Some holiday he was,” she declares with heavy irony). We learn about her friends Ben, who left his family for five years; Lee, murdered in the woods; Rachel, whose lover died of cancer and who has now taken into her life a homeless Vietnam vet whose behavior is ominous, to say the least; and daughter Anee, a struggling artist in New Mexico. At times, Batterson works both too hard and not hard enough. Some sentences groan with the weight of too much metaphor and self-conscious lyricism. And she frequently fails to moderate what can be an unpleasant tone of self-congratulation. (We are treated to two poems that celebrate her.) Yet the final segment (about the rescue of a black swan) is truly powerful: here, she does not overburden her narrative with platitude and attitude.
When the intent is not to elicit our admiration, the effect can be striking.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1553-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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