Miller knows how to let physical exploration of touch, comforting to intimate, pierce but not smother.
Bellingham Review editor Miller’s debut essays are elegant examples of life considered not theatrically or oppressively, but as a glistening, sensuous, and respectful tracking of intentions and acts.
These 22 reflective pieces have an admirable fearlessness in roving about the palpable connections in life. These can be between lovers, friends, and families, can be about the hours given to—or exacted by—melancholy, or given to bliss or to the fading of relationships (“two people begin to misplace the selves they have formed over the years”) or to love (“to probe that scared flesh and not hate each other for it”). Miller is not a minimalist, but she also doesn’t stand a lot of clutter and appreciates delicacy, as when your lover asks how many came before: “You must analyze the question carefully, because a correct answer does exist, in the air between you.” This is not coyness—Miller is never coy—but the taking of an artful, chess-like enjoyment. At other times, without slipping her moorings, the author moves into stormy reaches. “We sleep alone but something musses our hair in the night, strokes us into dishevelment, so in the morning our mirrors give back a person foreign and wild.” Miller takes enough chances, for there are inevitably to be jarring notes, as in the comparison of writers to masseurs, both “requiring the same inclination to listen with a hand pressed to the holy bone,” an awkward glancing reach. But playing in the fields of the emotions through the electricity of touch, she is finely tuned. She volunteers to be with newborns struggling through all sorts of ailments; “it’s a moment of simple communication,” she says, but readers will experience it as sublime, so holy does the writer cradling the child in her arms feel.
Miller knows how to let physical exploration of touch, comforting to intimate, pierce but not smother.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-889330-68-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
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
PERSPECTIVES
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