An elegant, moving contribution to the literature of death and dying.
An affecting paean to the author’s father, James Nwoye Adichie (1932-2020).
“I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing about my father in the past tense.” So writes award-winning Nigerian novelist Adichie, reflecting on her father’s remarkable life in this slim volume. The first professor of statistics in his country, James lived an eventful and sometimes fraught life. During the Biafran War, for instance, Nigerian soldiers burned all his books, which American colleagues rushed to replace—and, Adichie adds, sent bookshelves as well. He courted the author’s mother sight unseen: A relative bragged about the young scholar, saying he needed an educated wife: “A relative of hers said that she was educated and beautiful, fair as an egret. Fair as an egret! O na-enwu ka ugbana! Another standing family joke.” Funny and principled, James died during the pandemic—not of the virus but kidney disease. Compounding her grief was distance, and Adichie and her siblings followed Igbo tradition by making an “immediate pivot from pain to planning.” In one Zoom call after another, they arranged a burial on an approved Friday that’s not a holiday, since Fridays are the one day the parish priest will bury an elderly person—and, Adichie writes, not being given a proper funeral is a fear that amounts to existential dread among people of her father’s generation. She moves through some of the classic stages of grief, including no small amount of anger—at the well-meaning but empty word demise as well as the ineffectual condolences of well-meaning people: “ ‘It has happened, so just celebrate his life,’ an old friend wrote, and it incensed me.” Eventually, the author reflects on a newfound awareness of mortality and finds a “new urgency” to live her life and do her work in the ever present shadow of death.
An elegant, moving contribution to the literature of death and dying.Pub Date: May 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-32080-8
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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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