Reconstructed from thousands of letters the pair exchanged over 16 years, this tender and unusual narrative offers a rare,...
A former prison inmate and his wife share the personal letters they exchanged during his incarceration, offering insight into their remarkable, if slightly obsessive relationship.
Landscape architect Davis began writing to Echols (Life After Death, 2012) in 1996 after seeing a documentary about the murder case that landed him on death row. She soon found herself drawn to not only Echols’ story, but also the man himself. The pair wrote to each other several times per week. They talked about everything from “chastity belts [and] whirling dervishes” to “17-year locusts and Paganini.” Within just a few short months, Davis and Echols had fallen in love despite the fact neither one of them knew what the other looked like. After a brief summer visit, the profound spiritual and emotional connection deepened to include a physical component that surprised both with its intensity. Speaking of her desire for Echols, Davis writes, “[m]y body is alive with it…it is agony. Echols in turn reveals his wish to have Davis with him, “flesh against flesh [with] nothing to separate us.” Execution and the ups and downs of the appeals process hung over the pair like a shadow, yet Davis and Echols still managed to create an elaborate world of "magickal" possibility from which they drew strength. Believing that they were going to “build a history that stretch[ed] to infinity,” they married in 1999. The fight to keep their love, hopes and dreams alive continued until Echols was finally released in 2011. Then the couple began a new struggle to lead a normal life free from the barriers and surveillance that had formerly defined their relationship.
Reconstructed from thousands of letters the pair exchanged over 16 years, this tender and unusual narrative offers a rare, courageously intimate view of a love that should never have survived and yet did.Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-16619-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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