In a sort of nouveau Dharma Bums, drifting in and out of Bay Area counterculture and the High Sierra, young Californian Duane combines a climber's journal with a memoir of the year following his graduation from Cornell. This writer hates cities and loves mountains so much that he dropped out of his junior year in Paris and headed for the PyrÇnÇes instead. Rejected by grad school, having ``failed at the Ivy League,'' he watches fraternity brothers get jobs at places like Salomon Brothers. (``Guys twenty-one years old wore the same suits as the broken-down old timers, both letting careers eat the whole middle out of their lives.'') He heads west, gets a job in a mountain-climbing equipment store in Berkeley, his hometown, hangs out with his youthful but wise parents, former 60's civil-rights activists, and cautiously, gently begins an affair with Kyla, a feminist organic gardener at U.C. Santa Cruz who worships the Goddess and wonders if she's gay. In one scene, naked in a meadow, they eat guavas while making love. Seeking some kind of logic and order to his life, Duane, under the tutelage of his father and uncle, both of whom are middle-aged and in better shape than he, sets himself the painstaking task of preparing for, and climbing, the biggest and most dangerous rock in the Sierra—El Capitan. On the granite faces of Yosemite, Duane's prose comes most alive. ``As we slid down our ropes the hues of cloud and stone on Half Dome continued to shift, light and vapor painting and repainting the wall.'' In the arenas of sport and love, he learns patience, understanding, and how to confront his fear. Lively and engaging, if sometimes too earnest and self- indulgent, this is a good graduation present for those Generation X-ers who can afford to be nonmaterialistic these days.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55597-210-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
