A soulful and sobering memoir of climate change and personal responsibilities.
An American-born Canadian journalist contemplates mindful living in a world threatened by climate change.
In her first book, one-time Seattle lawyer Saxifrage tells the story of how she evolved from “comfy mama to climate hawk.” Her transformation began when she participated in an organic farming program on Cortes Island, just off the coast of British Columbia. Saxifrage and her husband immediately fell in love with the island’s unspoiled natural beauty and bought a 20-acre parcel. Eager to help preserve Cortes Island for future generations, the author began to serve on community environmental boards and research climate change. What she learned from these experiences led her to implement a plan—which included buying a hybrid vehicle, line-drying clothes, riding bicycles, using electricity rather than natural gas and traveling long distances by bus—to reduce personal carbon emissions. As part of this project of "claiming [their] relationship" to the Earth, she and her husband even renamed themselves after a tiny flower of the genus Saxifragaceae. The more invested she became in the well-being of Cortes Island and the planet, the more connected she felt to the living, the dead and herself. The ancient human jawbone discovered on a second property the family owned allowed Saxifrage to understand “the gift of limited time in this beautiful place” that she had been granted. Efforts at remembering dreams connected her to her innermost self and a Jungian collective unconscious. At the same time, heightened awareness led to increased anxiety about the rapidity of ecological destruction. Mindfulness pulled her from the depths of her own encroaching despair. Through this practice, Saxifrage learned that her task as a planetary caretaker was to find the balance to enjoy life while finding the resilience she needed to carry on the fight to save the Earth.
A soulful and sobering memoir of climate change and personal responsibilities.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-86571-798-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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