An uneven book that gains surprising power as it moves toward the end.
Combination popular-science book/memoir of a gardener who lost her sense of smell.
The Garden Letter publisher Blodgett (Midwest Top 10 Garden Guide, 2004, etc.) discovered one day that her olfactory sense had gone haywire. All the worst odors she could think of—rotting garbage, decaying flesh, animal waste—were invading her nose in nauseating waves. The author learned from a doctor that her olfactory receptors had been wiped out, probably by the burning blast of an over-the-counter homeopathic nose spray that she had taken to fight off a head cold. What she smelled, the doctor informed her, were actually olfactory hallucinations due to a condition called phantosmia. It was as though her nose and brain were trying desperately to remember what the world smelled like. Within weeks, however, all olfactory sensations ceased, just in time for Christmas. Gone were the aromas of fir branches, candles, cookies and sweets. The progression of her condition into anosmia—total absence of scent—led Blodgett into a black hole as she pondered what she had lost and how hopeless she felt to convey it. Her loss, however, is the reader’s gain, as it inspires by far the best writing in the book. Perhaps overcompensating for the condition, the author became a sponge, soaking up everything she could read and learn about “the primal sense,” from medical research to Proust. Her book, which starts unpromisingly in the chirpy tone of a magazine feature, suddenly develops depth, pathos and poetry as it progresses. Blodgett succeeds in raising awareness about this misunderstood, underappreciated sense and how it heightens the pleasure of being alive, even as it plays a subtle role in keeping us alive. “Smells may be slow to register cognitively,” she writes, “but they operate with superb efficiency subliminally.” So, too, does Blodgett in this book, as she develops from a slightly dizzy suburban gardening enthusiast into a three-dimensional, suffering, intellectual human being.
An uneven book that gains surprising power as it moves toward the end.Pub Date: June 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-618-86188-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
