A pitch-perfect memoir, skirting sentimentality as it embraces sentiment, getting at nature’s marvel and its endless...
Naturalist/writer Carroll (Swampwalker’s Journal, 1999, etc.) reveals all the touchstones that turned him from a Turtle Boy to a Turtle Man.
At the age of eight, the author came across his first wild turtle, first swamp, first real border: “For some time I stood still, absorbing, becoming absorbed. A shivering intensity came over me.” With a Golden Nature Book as his grail map, Carroll takes to the wetlands, barely containing himself at the rush of spring thaw and honing the focus he will need to really see even a fragment of what is there. A spotted turtle becomes his all and only during the early days, and he conveys with enough oomph the effect it has on his sensibilities to make it seem utterly natural that a native place name for this continent is Turtle Island. But turtles will not be his only fixation; art will also help him make the connection he wants with the raw world. He traces the trajectory of his life, as true as a well-fletched arrow: the economic wretchedness of an artist scraping by, the moves throughout New Hampshire as he seeks employment, the melding of his painting and drawing with his avocation (and the influences that draw him in other directions as well), the feeling of being a square peg in a round hole, at odds with more conservative elements. Everywhere he goes, he finds bogs and backwaters and turtles—spotted, painted, wood, box, Blanding’s, and snapping. An episode with a 4 ½-foot, 46-pound behemoth of the last-mentioned variety will give readers who have any familiarity with the creature an inkling of the author’s fine madness. Throughout, his words have the ping of authenticity; Carroll is an environmentalist who lives the word right down to his wet sneakers.
A pitch-perfect memoir, skirting sentimentality as it embraces sentiment, getting at nature’s marvel and its endless transfigurations. (40 b&w line drawings and halftones by the author)Pub Date: March 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-16225-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
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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