A beguiling play-by-play about a vibrant literary happening.
A hilarious account of the 2011 National Poetry Slam competition that illuminates a raucous subculture of competitive versifying from the inside.
Part beatnik culturefest and part bowling league, poetry slams involve teams of bards declaiming three-minute individual or group poems in front of randomly chosen judges and an audience of cheering, booing and drinking poetry aficionados. Tanager, a poet, led her four-woman team from Boise, Idaho, to compete against 71 other teams at the 2011 National Poetry Slam in Boston. Her fizzy reportage brings to vivid life this unlikeliest of American sporting events, detailing the pre-slam jitters and practice sessions; the behind-the-scenes clash of egos and gossipy backstabbing; and the quagmire of soggy identity politics. It also covers the poets’ last-minute strategizing over which poems to recite in order to sway fickle judges and audiences; the exhilaration of victory and the demoralization of loss to lesser, trendier poets; and the oblivion of booze and dancing at the afterparty. (“I’ll never leave you again, Beer!” the author vows after a painful defeat.) Tanager’s loose-limbed narrative, unfolding in a series of brief feuilletons, has a breezy, chatty tone and sprinkles the episodes from the slam with lively excursions into the food, fashions and harmless flirtations swirling around it. She’s alive to the absurdities of the scene, rolling her eyes at poetic self-importance (her own included) and lampooning preachy issue poems (“An Open Letter to that Bad Person I Read About in a Magazine”). Yet she takes the art form seriously, limns the empty spot in the soul that drives poets to perfect their craft and expose it to the world, and celebrates hard-won moments of compelling expression. There’s not much poetry in the book, but Tanager compensates with prose that is, by turns, funny, vehement, self-deprecating and gorgeous. At daybreak in an airplane, for example, she writes, “a glorious and silent choreographed battle of gold and fuchsia, pulse and vibration, grows brighter and brighter, huge and symphonic below me.” Alas, the book’s awful title will put off some readers, but those who persevere will find a whip-smart, wise and entertaining read.
A beguiling play-by-play about a vibrant literary happening.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1502758989
Page Count: 282
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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