Bruno is a silent partner, often unmentioned for pages at a time, but Smith relates their experiences in a deliberate,...
Exploring the Midwest, the past, and the passing of time on a road trip with a chocolate Lab named Bruno.
A two-week solo road trip across the Great Plains is a journey that can be approached in two different ways: as an unsavory, short-as-possible trek of necessity or as an opportunity that provides miles of uninterrupted reverie, a chance for the mind to luxuriate in all manner of memories. For writer and filmmaker Smith (In This We Are Native, 2002, etc.), a founding board member of the Sundance Institute, it was more the latter that appealed to her, with one minor change: her traveling companion, Bruno. In the preface, the author discusses the losses that followed her journey. While still reworking the book, Bruno became ill, and the veterinarian was unable to save him; Smith’s mother, the lodestar of the story in ways both physical (she was going to help her mother with moving) and spiritual, passed away. Furthermore, the start of her trip occurred in the same month as the anniversary of the death of Smith’s husband. Before embarking, the author entered the date, mileage, and time of departure in her journal. Then the numbers mostly faded into the background. She holds her life and the choices made—by her and for her—up to the light cast by her relationships with friends and family. She also tenderly shares the details of some of the losses in her life and examines what happens to hopes when they are fulfilled differently than one might expect and when the person doing the hoping finds herself looking backward to find her way forward. “One twist of the kaleidoscope at memory’s core causes the shards to fragment and re-pattern,” writes the author, “but they are always the same shards.”
Bruno is a silent partner, often unmentioned for pages at a time, but Smith relates their experiences in a deliberate, thoughtful way.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59534-669-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Trinity Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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