Entertaining reading for budding apiarists and armchair nature enthusiasts.
An intimate look at one woman’s experience with beekeeping.
After helping a friend of a friend with his bees, British writer Jukes decided to get a colony of her own even though she knew little about them. “I hadn’t even realized…that honeybees are different from bumblebees,” she writes, “that there are over twenty thousand species of bee in the world, and only a fraction of them make honey.” The author had a woodworker build her a special hive so she could establish her colony in a wind-protected section of her back garden. While she waited for the appropriate time to begin her new hobby, she plunged headlong into the complex history of bees and beekeeping through the centuries, and she shares her extensive research with readers. Though informative, these elements are occasionally dry. Fortunately, Jukes juxtaposes this history with her ongoing interactions with her hive, which brings her tale back to life. Readers share in her concerns about cold weather and how the new colony is adjusting to their nontraditional hive, rejoice in the abundance of new bees, and worry as the hive moves closer and closer to the swarming phase. The author clearly conveys the necessity of dedication, focus, and calm when handling bees, and she palpably portrays the moment when she was able to fully let go of her day-to-day anxieties and concentrate solely on her charges. She also interweaves a late-blooming romance into her story, which further sweetens the narrative. Throughout the book, Jukes portrays her experiences with vivid imagination and a spirit that encourages readers to think deeper about a creature that is vital to all life on this planet. “The honeybees opened me out,” she writes, “led me into a new understanding of the world and my place in it….Flowers, bees, weather, people—they’re all connected, all part of a larger ecosystem.”
Entertaining reading for budding apiarists and armchair nature enthusiasts.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4786-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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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