A well-curated assemblage of Black voices that draws profound connections among family, nature, aspiration, and loss.
A unique collection of nature writing focused on Black experience and memory.
This book is a response to the absence of Black literature about attachment to the American landscape, a multigenerational dwelling place that is both internal and external. An abundance of relevant themes emerge: home as refuge, seeking freedom amid social oppression, gardens as healers, and the complex history of Black landownership. Opening with an irony that casts its shadow on the pages that follow, Sharkey describes a youthful photo of her mother “kneeling by a pond on a twelve-acre property in New York that she and my father will never own, but that will become their legacy.” Attachment does not equal possession, and Sharkey’s own quest for “home” becomes all-consuming, extending to the realm of nature writing that “has been dominated by white, cisgender men with access to resources,” from Thoreau to Audubon, Abbey to Pollan. These essays hit from refreshingly different angles. Birder Sean Hill juxtaposes his life to that of Austin Dabney, a Revolutionary War soldier rewarded with land grants and freedom (at least from slavery). Alexis Pauline Gumbs connects her life to that of “Black feminist speculative nature poet” Audre Lorde. The more academic essays are the fruit of archival research, though Sharkey reminds us to be attuned to “the racist structures in place in the institutions of memory.” Lauret Savoy provides ample illustrations of American place names that are “not innocent, passive, or neutral.” Similar in approach and spirit to Tiya Miles’ All That She Carried, these selections are written in response to artifacts, with the exception of Ronald L. Greer’s “Magic Alley,” which lyrically depicts the beauty and horrors of a Detroit neighborhood through the eyes of a child, a place where “the people who used the powdery substance alchemically transformed it to a liquid, then used a needle to escape to another dimension.”
A well-curated assemblage of Black voices that draws profound connections among family, nature, aspiration, and loss.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781571313904
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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