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
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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