A captivating look at a poet’s repeated attempt “to dig a hole in eternity” through language.
A memoir that stretches the limits of its genre by making a dog the textual centerpiece.
Notorious poet Myles (I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014, 2015, etc.) strikes again with an irreverently poetic memoir that traces her experience losing her pit bull Rosie. The book begins with a hand-addressed letter Myles received in 1999 that reads, “I take the liberty…of forcing you to legally take responsibility for the damages you have inflicted over a period of nine years upon the being you have taken to calling ‘Rosie.’ I am Rosie’s lawyer.” From there, the author spirals into an introspective look at what it means to be a dog and to be at the mercy of another human. Myles divides the book into a series of mostly brief episodes—some true, some made-up, many experimental in structure and tone—that reflect Rosie’s thoughts as well as the author’s experiences with her own thoughts, but it never becomes overly nostalgic or sad. “The past is so often a place whose colors are only in my mind,” writes Myles. Certainly, readers may feel like much of the narrative’s meat happens offstage, but that’s part of the author’s charm. “I like to make it heavier sometimes. Saying versions of the same thing,” she writes, “I mean here. You probably already guessed it but I like saying it again. That one little piece again with a twist. And a thud. I don’t feel this way about everything but there are moments that need to be heavy. As a fact. Not an idea.” Rarely too heavy to be approachable, Myles’ work is a perfect example of what happens when you mix raw language with emotion, pets with loss, and sexuality with socioculturalism.
A captivating look at a poet’s repeated attempt “to dig a hole in eternity” through language.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2709-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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
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