An engrossing and offbeat story of ideological bonds that chafe—and sometimes liberate.
A young woman experiences a sexual awakening—and romantic frustration—in a kooky cult in this debut coming-of-age memoir.
After her graduation from Harvard in 1999, Zuman’s search for herself took her to the Zendik Farm commune in North Carolina. Founded in the 1960s on countercultural blather, Zendik preached back-to-the-land living, contempt for the “Deathculture” of competitive capitalism, and psycho-motivational aphorisms—“Dare to demand the impossible and it becomes possible”—from deceased guru Wulf Zendik’s The Affirmative Life. In Zuman’s telling, Zendik’s reality is strange and crass. Members supported the commune by hawking its magazine, music CDs, and bumper stickers—“Stop Bitching Start a Revolution”—on the streets, which made maniacal salesmanship a Zendik must. Meanwhile, sex on the farm was rigidly bureaucratized. Members proposed “walks” (dates) or “dates” (sex appointments) with other Zendiks by lodging requests with administrators, who acted as go-betweens in scheduling assignations; women were denied dates if group gynecological exams indicated they were in a fertile phase. (The guru, who had bedded most female Zendiks, disliked condoms.) Zuman, a shy but yearning virgin, appreciated this protocol because it obviated her awkwardness at courtship; soon she had an active sex life and got to act out her rape fantasy (in a graphic description, it’s a painful, bloody fiasco ending in herpes). Unfortunately, Zendik thought monogamy undermined the group, and Zuman was repeatedly pressured into wrenching breakups with long-term boyfriends; but when she left the farm to hitchhike to Idaho and find permanent love, predatory men sent her running back. Zuman’s vivid portrait renders Zendik as a pressure cooker of jealousy and exploitation under the manipulative leadership of Arol, Wulf’s consort. Zendiks were exhorted to take personal responsibility for their dysfunctions, yet the supreme sin was “running your own show” in defiance of the collective—read Arol’s—will. Yet Zuman never makes herself a victim: She retains her sense of agency (and humor) as she weighs Zendik’s weird creed and power plays against the sense of righteousness and belonging that drew her in. Her whip-smart prose—on her selling shifts, she “hit up mostly single men, zeroing in on the disheveled, disaffected, afraid, and misshapen…if they paired superhero trucker caps with Coke-bottle glasses…so much the better”—conveys the squalid exuberance of Zendik’s blend of idealism and fraud.
An engrossing and offbeat story of ideological bonds that chafe—and sometimes liberate.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-337-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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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