A quiet treasure.
A vivid and affectionate memoir of the vanishing traditions of the Saltwater Geechee people living on Sapelo Island, off the coast of Georgia.
Almost all of Sapelo Island is now occupied by a nature preserve and the campus of the University of Georgia Marine Institute, but it was once home to a vibrant African-American community whose isolation from the mainland helped preserve many elements of West African life. Bailey, a lifelong Sapelo resident, remembers her childhood in the villages of Raccoon Bluff and Hog Hammock with a deep awareness of the beauty of her disappearing culture. In simple, lucid language that retains the rhythms of the island’s vernacular, she evokes the spare beauty of the Sea Islands through prosaic, child’s-eye details. The presence of the sea pervades Sapelo Island: “On high tide,” she writes, “you’d smell the salt more and on low tide, you’d get a whiff of the sea and everything in it. . . . ‘Just smell that marsh,’ Mama would say proudly. ‘It smell so marshy.’ ” The author depicts the Geechee community’s close-knit but often troubled family relationships without sentimentality, remembering funeral customs and numbers rackets as well as the daily household rituals of meals and chores. She balances the islanders’ knowledge of animal and plant life, their traditional medicines and garden lore, against the precariousness of survival in the face of illness, poverty, hurricanes, and rip tides. Her memoir provides a valuable record of the most striking Geechee customs, including “ring shouts” (or circle dances), “root” magic, and classic trickster stories; in a moving coda, Bailey describes a trip to Sierra Leone, where she retraced the West African origins of these traditions. But her precise recall of small, easily forgotten daily routines is even more remarkable: poulticing a swollen ankle with mullein (“a plant with big, light green fuzzy leaves”) or fishing for mullet with a homemade cotton-thread net that “glides out over the water, opens into a big, wide circle and sinks down over any fish that happen to be in that spot.”
A quiet treasure.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-49376-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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
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
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