Without the heft of Marc Reisner or Victor Davis Hanson, but still a tour of the interior West worth taking.
Nevada-born novelist Bergon (Jesse’s Ghost, 2011, etc.) takes readers along the back roads of central California, painting a portrait of “the communal values of today’s True West.”
In today’s political climate, a lot of oxygen is being burned up in arguments over immigration and, to a lesser extent, resource use, both key issues in the San Joaquin Valley. There, notes the author, everyone came from somewhere else, exotic places such as Armenia, Italy, and the Basque country. “Not melted into a homogeneous American society,” he writes, “they stamped California, Nevada, and by extension the West as pluralistic.” Nativists may broil at the thought, but that pluralistic tradition continues. By Bergon’s account, the region, made up of Okies and African-Americans and Hispanics and everyone else, is at least a hair more tolerant than elsewhere in the country; as one Jewish resident of Madera recalls, asked whether he’d experienced discrimination, “hell, no. There weren’t enough of us. To have discrimination you need a group.” The region offered opportunities of many kinds to those newcomers, mostly in agriculture. The author offers the story of Fred Franzia, who labored and negotiated his way into the ownership of numerous abandoned and disused wineries and their labels, one of them the famed “Two-Buck Chuck” blends sold at Trader Joe’s. (A neighbor who first entered the United States illegally bottles the Green Fin label, made of organic grapes, for which TJ’s is the exclusive outlet.) There’s the Marlboro man of the title, too, an actual working cowboy who smoked, and a panoply of other players, including Native American novelist Louis Owens. Bergon makes clear that for all its virtues, though, Central California isn’t paradise—in good part because, as a farmer cousin tells him, “California is drying up….All the farmers are going out of business. It’s bad. Now they’re regulating the water.”
Without the heft of Marc Reisner or Victor Davis Hanson, but still a tour of the interior West worth taking.Pub Date: March 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948908-06-1
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Univ. of Nevada
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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