Emulating Carlos Castaneda, anthropologist Wesselman recounts his spirit journeys 5,000 years into the future, when an ecologically devastated America has been partly colonized by Hawaiians and Eskimos. In 1983, Wesselman began to experience altered states of consciousness in which he believed himself to be present in the body and mind of a Hawaiian explorer and mystic named Nainoa. This book describes the author's wanderings through an America with a very different coastline, covered with forests, and sparsely inhabited. The people of the future, whom he comes to know through Nainoa's thoughts and conversations, preserve legends of a Fall and Great Flood that brought an end to the fabled Great Age of the Americans and their civilization. Nainoa's world is essentially that of hunter-gatherers who have no metals or machinery and live a simple life, close to the earth, with New Agestyle beliefs and values. What Wesselman learns from Nainoa, and later from an Ennuit shaman, confirms his own worst fears that we are currently on the brink of a global disaster because political leaders like Ronald Reagan refused to take seriously the threats posed by the greenhouse effect and because religious leaders opposed contraception and abortion as means to reduce population growth. In the author's scenario, melting of the ice caps will soon lead to an increase in the sea level sufficient to engulf all ports and thus prevent the transportation of oil and other necessities of modern life. Some clever passages describe how Wesselman and Nainoa occasionally change places in their respective time zones (no one else can tell) and even communicate with each other, but the author is less convincing when he tries to depict folk memories of our society as they would have survived over 5,000 years. A minatory vision that will impress the credulous and lovers of superficial, eclectic mysticism.
Pub Date: July 17, 1995
ISBN: 0-553-09976-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
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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