A hushed, meditative tribute to the nearly forgotten value of living off the land.
Novelist Kessler (Birds in Fall, 2006, etc.) chronicles the time he and his wife spent among dairy goats in rural Vermont.
Burned out from the daily grind of New York City, Kessler and his wife Dona purchased a 75-acre parcel of land to establish a working goat farm. The author details their foray into pastoral living with all the imagery and polished word choice one would expect from a practiced novelist. From the daily challenges and rewards of acquiring, shepherding, breeding and milking Nubian goats and birthing young kids, to their first experience with cheese-making, Kessler’s account serves as a user-friendly how-to manual on goat farming. The author also delves into the foundations and history of goat keeping, the predator/prey relationship (as he tracks the coyotes that are frequenting his barnyard) and man’s quest for a spiritual connection with other creatures and the land that sustains him. The book is more than just a story of escape from urban monotony; it’s also a detailed diary of the transformative effects of a new beginning. Because the entries don’t always cohere as a chronological narrative, the chapters are short, conclusions are somewhat choppy and the material, while interesting, is exceedingly quiet in tone. Nonetheless, Kessler pleasingly echoes the work of Annie Dillard and Georgeanne Brennan’s A Pig in Provence (2007).
A hushed, meditative tribute to the nearly forgotten value of living off the land.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6099-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
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
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
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