A writer’s up-and-down search for profundity in the insecure and unrefined corners of his life.
Tin House managing editor Knapp debuts with a collection of essays that attempt to balance highbrow and lowbrow elements.
In “Faces of Pain,” the author and a photographer attend a wrestling event held at the Portland Lion’s Club, where he “saw so many incredible things I almost couldn’t believe my eyes.” “Beirut” is an existential reflection on beer pong and the author’s frat-house 20s. “Mysteries We Live With” is an investigation into true-believer UFO subculture mixed with stories of the author’s own Christian upbringing. Most of the essays flow with self-deprecating charm, but Knapp often trips over his own wordiness and unnecessarily complicated verbiage. In the 90-page concluding essay, “Something’s Gotta Stick,” the author recounts his days at an adult skateboarding camp, lost in nostalgia while hunting for affirmation that would “clarify my relationship to my past, and, in so doing, help me lean into the future as if it were a headwind.” Knapp sees stories everywhere, committed to a belief that the lives around him are each their own unwritten memoirs. While a curious, self-conscious take on memoir, Knapp’s essays are often overwrought. The prolix “Neighborhood Watch” is a story of gentrification and the intersection of neighboring lives in the aftermath of a local man’s murder. The author ponders, again, “the vital and vivifying mystery” of life, that another person’s existence can be so different yet “so close to where the epic drama of your own life is set.” “Why can’t I get out of my own way?” he asks in one essay. “Seems I’m always getting caught in the sticky wicket of self-consciousness, overaware of how the story’s being told. Overaware that a story’s being told. My default mode tends to be this one of narration, meaning, roughly, that an experience doesn’t really become ‘real’ for me until it’s prosed.” These essays, often about trying to be stories we’re not, are carried by Knapp’s struggle toward self-acceptance.
A writer’s up-and-down search for profundity in the insecure and unrefined corners of his life.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6102-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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