A taste of living theater, with all its entanglements, fragments, and doldrums.
A fleshed-out diary of a year spent on an island—man, woman, child, dogs—that, in its reflection of the quotidian, isn’t always totally engaging.
With a piece of the cash from his bestselling My Old Man and the Sea (1995), Hays purchased an island off the Canadian coast, 50 acres of unedited earth surrounded by the North Atlantic. It’s a place, as Hays tells it in his plainspoken, intelligent voice, to escape civilization, a wild land where he can find himself. Except now he has a wife and Stephan, her 11-year-old son, with all that age’s bright and dim spots. So what Hays must do is find himself within the matrix of family as he basks in the glory of the island landscape, a task he chronicles in this catalogue of days. Much of the material, though nicely shaped, is simply a recounting of activities: putting up wood for winter (though how they burn all that unseasoned wood is a mystery), making a dock, building and rebuilding all the stuff they need (and, killing time, don’t need: “Now comes the really stupid part: having forgotten why I am putting an unneeded shelf nowhere useful”). There is the process of getting to know Stephan, perhaps the most captivating aspect of the story, and the incessant bickering with his wife, perhaps the least captivating, though certainly the most pervasive. The island itself, which appears in fits and starts throughout the narrative, is an enigma—its heart an impenetrable spruce thicket—and readers must accept Hays’s love of the place rather than share it. What does come intensely across are those blood-red skies, all that weather, shrieking winds, stormy seas, and bell-clear days.
A taste of living theater, with all its entanglements, fragments, and doldrums.Pub Date: June 7, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-345-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
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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