A memoir about an American original by an American original, a literary journalist who merits more than a regional...
An unflinchingly honest writer addresses the death of his friend and kindred spirit Edward Abbey (1927-1989).
Since Abbey’s death, he has been canonized as some sort of environmental saint, memorialized through what Bowden (Dreamland: The Way Out of Juarez, 2010, etc.), who died in 2014, has called the “Dead Ed Industry,” which has made him a hero to many whom the author disparages as the “mush-headed-crystal-gazing-safe-sex-tofu-munching souls.” Like Abbey, Bowden was first considered a nature writer before turning his attention to drug wars and other violence across the Mexican border. Both had an ornery streak, with Bowden occasionally recalling a more disciplined Hunter S. Thompson, without the self-indulgence. He is cleareyed, and he pulls no punches, whether writing about “the seriously haunted ground” where he lives—“the earth here is dotted with ruins and from time to time you can feel the bony hands of the dead on your shoulders”—or describing the process of honoring his late friend: “I feel like I’m being asked to introduce a badass rap singer to a herd of seminary students.” This concise, pithy volume focuses on a panel discussion he reluctantly moderated to celebrate Abbey and raise funds. He then uses that event as a springboard for all sorts of memories and meditations on Abbey, his literary reputation, fame in general, and the posthumous sanitizing that has rendered this cantankerous anarchist as neutered and housebroken. “The only safe way to keep dead people dead,” writes Bowden, “is to forget they were ever alive and lived in a manner as messy and sad and happy as the rest of it.” Abbey lives within these pages, which Bowden wrote in 1994, shortly after the conference on Abbey. This belated publication should not only send readers back to Abbey, but also back to Bowden’s work.
A memoir about an American original by an American original, a literary journalist who merits more than a regional readership.Pub Date: April 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4773-1579-8
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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