A good read for armchair travelers.
Memoir of building a life in the remote Brazilian jungle.
In 1989, with their children grown and an itch for change, Le Breton (The Greatest Gift: The Courageous Life and Martyrdom of Sister Dorothy Stang, 2008, etc.) and her husband Robin left Washington, D.C., and purchased a farm in an isolated mountain region in southeastern Brazil. They named the farm Iracambi, a Tupi Indian word meaning “Land of Milk and Honey.” However, it was anything but, with no electricity, no plumbing, no phone, mud roads that became impassable when it rained and a bridge to their property that threatened to collapse at any minute. Robin, an agricultural economist, was more prepared for the challenge of their new life, but Le Breton, a concert pianist, doubted her abilities and willingness to make Iracambi her permanent home. Perhaps more troubling was the insular and conservative nature of their new neighbors, who were passive in the face of generations of grinding poverty and deeply suspicious of outsiders. But there was work to be done, and slowly life on the farm began to improve. Iracambi became a successful cattle ranch, and Robin began plans for a new farm house. To help them, they hired a number of local people, and through such contacts they formed mutual bonds of respect and, eventually, love. Le Breton and Robin became a catalyst for much-needed change in the region, hiring women to work on seeding forest land and encouraging their new friends to take local elections seriously and elect leadership that would actually do something for them. Change did come, with new schools, paved roads, health services and, in the local village, the universal sign of progress: “a forest of television antennae.” The author changed as well, coming to love Iracambi and finding herself more capable than she thought.
A good read for armchair travelers.Pub Date: May 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-57405-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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