Scholarship for science-fiction scholars.
A deep reading of the work of the late science-fiction master.
If readers outside the realm of science fiction haven’t heard of Octavia Butler (1947-2006), Canavan (Literature/Marquette Univ.; co-editor: The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction, 2015) suggests that they should have: “She was never, perhaps, quite the household name she had once hoped to be—but she was widely and deeply beloved.” Best known for her 1979 novel Kindred, she was “a legend in her field, one of the best writers of her generation,” and was the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship and a PEN lifetime achievement award. This is no book for those needing an introduction to the futurist, anti-utopian vision of a black female author in a field dominated by white males. Full appreciation for these analyses requires not only a deep familiarity with her fiction, but also of the academic interpretations and arguments it has spawned. Here is a representative sentence: “Against the tradition of Butler criticism that has emphasized a postcolonial politics of cosmopolitan hybridity and that has consequently tended to view the [fictional] Oankali as legitimate benefactors to humankind, then, I feel I must insist on the extent to which the Oankali turn out, in this reading, to be genuinely monstrous after all.” Such analysis is targeted at those for whom reading a text is a precursor to “unpacking” it. Canavan provides plenty of plot description and analysis of fiction that has never been published since Butler’s published work (12 novels, one story collection) “is really only the very tip of a vast iceberg.” There remains a “vast intertextual hidden archive of alternative versions and lost tales that will, I hope, reinvigorate the study of her work.” Butler is a significant, influential author, but this study best serves those who already recognize her significance and influence.
Scholarship for science-fiction scholars.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-252-08216-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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
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
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