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AND NOW WE SHALL DO MANLY THINGS

DISCOVERING MY MANHOOD THROUGH THE GREAT (AND NOT-SO-GREAT) AMERICAN HUNT

A lightweight but entertaining seriocomic search for selfhood.

A journalist attempts to reclaim his flagging manhood through hunting.

Online family-issues guru (manofthehouse.com) Heimbuch (Chasing Oliver Hazard Perry, 2010) roots this book in his desire to suddenly live up to the manly Midwestern values of his avid hunter father, who one day gave his son a 12-gauge shotgun as a gift. Heimbuch had been outdoorsy—fly fisherman, gearhead and L.L. Bean enthusiast—but had never ventured into gun-toting territory. The author’s quest to validate his manhood via pheasant hunting soon goes beyond the father-son issues into more of a personal challenge to break out of his blandly routinized life as a small-time reporter and dutiful husband. Along the way, the book derives its comedic appeal from Heimbuch’s built-in liberal defenses against the largely conservative gun culture he had to force himself to confront. In fact, his inaugural visit to the NRA’s Rivers of Freedom convention became the perfect opportunity to mine his combination of disgust and wide-eyed fascination with this gun-nut spectacle (complete with an appearance by gun-loving former rocker Ted Nugent) for comedic gold. The conflicted author then headed out for the wilds of Iowa to test his newfound resolve as a pheasant hunter, and he devotes the second half of the book to the unintentional humor that naturally comes out of a newbie hunter chasing elusive feathered creatures around in a forest. But Heimbuch doggedly persevered, and in the end, his noble quest to become a successful gamesman narrowly avoids anticlimax. Although the book essentially thrives on self-deprecating humor, there are some well-illustrated lessons about the unexpected benefits of stepping outside comfortable workaday routines to get a clearer perspective on one’s potential as a human being.

A lightweight but entertaining seriocomic search for selfhood.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-06-219786-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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