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
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
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
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