A curious, intensive exploration of the eccentric world of silence and solitude.
A British filmmaker and journalist documents the mysteries of selective speechlessness.
In her affecting debut, Shawcross charts the lives and struggles of people for whom interactive communication has become a virtually insurmountable feat. As a homesick exchange student studying English at the University of California, the author discovered the writings of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet George Oppen. She was fascinated by the fact that he abandoned poetry for more than two decades after serving in World War II. The author also reports on childhood selective mutism, following the unique activity and progress at a New York camp for mute teenagers, and she discusses how menstruation has been tabooed to almost mythical proportions in the mountains of far west Nepal. Shawcross chronicles her time at a Buddhist retreat and her visit with a silent order of nuns in central London where peacefulness is golden and ritualistic: “The…sisters have renounced almost all contact with the world….Their lives are dedicated to prayer.” Shawcross refers often to Oppen’s life and poetry, which serves as a kind of anchor to her narrative. She shares an enlightening interview with Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, a project the author participated in. Braided throughout these profiles and stories is Shawcross’ moving personal history. As a child, she’d lost the ability to speak in conversation with others and retreated into her own silent world. This development was spurred by the permanent arrival of her grandmother into the family home and the shame of her father’s sudden unemployment. “I never intended to stop talking….It felt safer, easier somehow, to say the bare minimum,” she writes. Those years of self-imposed pseudo-silence shaped her as a future journalist and a pensive filmmaker but also plagued her romantic relationships with women. Though she slowly found her own voice again in adulthood, the author still admits to experiencing difficulty in saying what she feels even on the brink of marriage, an “alien” but welcome concept to her.
A curious, intensive exploration of the eccentric world of silence and solitude.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78689-004-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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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