Warm, funny and touching.
An “artsy San Francisco dilettante” tells the story of how she traded her urban existence for a life of “chasing cows…and executing chickens” in rural New Zealand.
In 2004, Murphy and her husband decided to move abroad to New Zealand, where Murphy gave birth to a developmentally delayed son named Silas and, later, a little “savage” of a daughter named Miranda. When it came time for Silas to start his education, the family moved to Purua, a tiny community that was home to a school where “no one would judge [him]” for being different. American bohemians with romantic visions of country living, they took up residence on a rented farm. Strange accents, Murphy’s own peculiar habit of wearing Halloween animal ears, and lack of knowledge regarding what it really took to raise livestock and grow their own food soon made the Murphys the object of curiosity and scorn. The arrival of a farm-savvy niece from New York proved the family's salvation. She helped the Murphys persevere through misadventures involving baby calves with long, black tongues, alpacas that looked like teddy bears but behaved atrociously, sheep that required “ovine Brazilian[s]” and a dog that ate feces. Stripped of their initial illusions, Murphy and her husband learned that “[r]eal country life…involved blood, shit, and worms.” But it also involved simple yet profound pleasures, such as consuming their homemade artisanal wines and cheeses with the colorful group of expatriates and locals who eventually became family friends. Murphy’s book presents an unsentimental, at times unapologetically graphic, treatment of farm life. At the same time, it offers a comic yet thoroughly wise perspective on what it means to start over in a new country and live close to a natural world that is anything but romantic.
Warm, funny and touching.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-1592409051
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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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