A broad examination of life, philosophy, and Christianity that still manages to feel personal and powerfully intimate.
Carrier’s memoir doubles as a treatise that carefully examines life and the Christian faith.
Carrier’s work is roughly broken into three movements: autobiography, ideas and concepts, and a declaration of faith. Throughout all three, he strikes a tone balanced between casual conversation and rigorous lecture—unsurprising given his many degrees, long tenure as a professor, and zany humor. He looks back at his younger self with a careful, analytical eye. As he goes from unwanted stepchild in a mansion to football star in a small Mississippi town at the beginning of the 1960s, his insightful observations reveal the moments that shaped him: for instance, his concern for a beagle above all else or the realization that a black maid was both “invisible and indispensable.” His tumultuous young adulthood as well as transformative religious experiences set the stage for the second section, which moves with a remarkable pace through many major events and changes of late-20th-century America. Intellectual movements, scientific discoveries, and pop culture all play into the notion of zeitgeist, what he calls “The Culture.” He relates all of it back to his own faith, working from a central argument that modern Christianity ought to abandon certain practices and more openly connect with the contemporary secular world. At times, the book’s audacious scope is overwhelming. However, just when readers start to feel lost in a bombardment of references or an especially dense assertion, Carrier’s own life interjects. Bracketed sections break away from the topic at hand to update the reader on his autistic brother, Michael, who was dying of cancer as Carrier was writing. These digressions make the work feel like a naturally unfolding narrative as Carrier moves from tangent to tangent while being interrupted by the unstoppable forces of life.
A broad examination of life, philosophy, and Christianity that still manages to feel personal and powerfully intimate.Pub Date: April 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63417-798-6
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Page Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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