In taut, sometimes-tense prose, Johnson shows us so many varieties of human pain as well as many glimmers of hope.
A writer with deep Appalachian roots rehearses his life story, positioning it under the most exacting of microscopes.
Harper’s contributor Johnson (The Man Who Loved Birds, 2016, etc.), who was born and raised “in the Kentucky Knobs, a westward-flung, northwest-curling finger of the Appalachians,” has a variety of topics on his agenda in these essays, which date to as early as 1989 and as recently as 2016; some appear for the first time here. His dawning awareness that he is gay, the death of his lover to AIDS in 1990 (his most painful memories of this occur in several essays), his struggles with religion (somewhat resolved in recent years), his determination to recognize love as the key to all—these subjects he visits throughout. In another way, Johnson, whose first name came from a Trappist monk who lived near his home, reveals other aspects of his personality and character less directly. Numerous literary allusions, for example, show his wide and eclectic reading. William James, George Eliot, Sophocles, Lewis Thomas, Thomas Merton, Mark Twain, and numerous others rise up continually in his prose to reaffirm or confirm a point, to illustrate, or to summarize. Johnson also evinces a fairly liberal political sensibility, and his 2014 essay on war and pacifism, “Power and Obedience: Restoring Pacifism to American Politics,” reveals the depths of his opposition to war. Johnson writes in a learned, serious, and occasionally erudite style, and he makes little use of irony or humor. Throughout the collection, we infer much about his personal life: his Kentucky boyhood, his undergraduate years at Stanford, and a bit about his teaching. One brief essay, “Witness and Storyteller,” from 2008, is even a tad erotic.
In taut, sometimes-tense prose, Johnson shows us so many varieties of human pain as well as many glimmers of hope.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-941411-43-8
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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