Despite his personal connection to guns, Collins is frustratingly unopinionated about the elephant in the room.
A veteran journalist recounts his upbringing within a culture of guns.
At the beginning, Collins claims that this is “not an antigun book.” However, the book is not entirely pro-gun either, as the author is careful to remain an observer without too much editorializing. Recounting his childhood in small-town Nevada, Collins portrays his affection for the rugged individualism of the Western lifestyle. He recalls his first goose hunting trip at the age of 4, making homemade fish oil by burying a trash can filled with fish for several months, and even spying on local cathouse women sunbathing topless. The other aspect of the romantic West that attracted Collins: guns. The author describes the gun as America’s “one constant companion,” and that was certainly true of his own upbringing. In particular, one hunting expedition proved an early example of the danger of guns, and it serves as the backbone of his narrative. Barely a teenager, Collins accidentally shot himself in his foot with a hunting rifle and had to endure his injury for more than eight hours as he traveled out of the wilderness to the nearest hospital. The author was lucky; had the shot entered only a fraction of an inch in the other direction, he might have lost his foot. In his remembrance, however, others were not so fortunate. Collins recalls numerous personal experiences of senseless violence caused by guns, sometimes killing and other times severely disabling. (Collins himself had another close call with a loaded shotgun he was sure he’d emptied.) At times, he tries to justify our persistent love affair with guns by claiming that “guns are part of our country’s creation myth” and providing fanciful historical anecdotes meant to contextualize the endless violence, but it’s hard to see how the author can remain so aloof and indifferent to guns and gun culture considering how intimately he has been affected by them.
Despite his personal connection to guns, Collins is frustratingly unopinionated about the elephant in the room.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4930-0385-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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
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
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