Mountain City deserves a better eulogy.
Snapshots of the dying Nevada mining town of Mountain City, this unwieldy collage slaps together pictures of life there with little concern for how the pieces fit.
Mountain City, like all small towns, is only as interesting as the people in it, andwe do find some real gems that the miners left behind. Rosella Chambers, the oldest citizen and proud member of the widows’ club, jolts the narrative awake every moment she appears, whether driving her jeep with a broken hip or moving on to the nursing home in Elko after 90-plus years in her hometown. Likewise, Uncle Mel perks up any moments of sagging narration with, for example, his hilarious reaction to Zeno’s paradox and his views of the economic genius of prostitution; the man’s vibrant presence even outweighs his penchant for sophomoric jokes. Voyne the Wino, Martin’s cousin Graham, and a frozen kitten are other notable members of the cast of characters, and the story of Martin’s grandfather accidentally killing a neighbor’s dog is honestly poignant. Unfortunately, the townspeople never interact much: we see individuals but never get a deep sense of how the town forms a meaningful whole. Furthermore, the promising moments of Martin’s prose are marred horribly by his pedantic revelations: the astute reader does not need the author to assist with the mathematical observation that 33 people live in Mountain City, but that this number rises to 34 when he visits. Mercifully, Martin only pulls out the italics to mimic his grandmother during a few short moments of excruciatingly bad voiceover. Even when the emotional reaction is not quite as heavily directed, the banality of some scenes (such as when Gramps and Martin work outside in the cold and enjoy being together) inhibits any real interest in the lives lived in this dying town.
Mountain City deserves a better eulogy.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-86547-594-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
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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