Moving and perceptive—a delightful, engaging memoir on aging.
Educator Kohl (She Would Not Be Moved, 2005, etc.) returns to the classroom, this time as a student of Chinese landscape painting.
Approaching his seventh decade, the author realized that the impression he had of himself as a “middle-aged guy” was at odds with society’s perception of him as old. He was feeling tired and vulnerable, worn down by his battles with the University of San Francisco administration over his social-justice program. As he wandered Clement Street in a predominantly Asian area of the city, Kohl noticed a storefront art school and decided to enroll. He hoped to learn more about landscape painting, which he had long admired; he also anticipated finding a fellow student who could teach him Chinese chess. When Kohl arrived for his first lesson, however, he discovered that all the other students were children, ages four to seven. Over the course of three years, the author learned the rituals and techniques of brush painting, moving from sketching monkeys and pandas to rendering graceful forests of bamboo. “I soon discovered that it was very difficult to breathe life into a bamboo,” he writes, “to have it move with wind, to have it serene on a quiet day, to have it bursting with leaves or barren or budding.” As the author relinquished his need to teach and learned to relish his role as student (albeit one who stuck out), the class served as a template for aging with enthusiasm and grace. The conclusion shows Kohl leaving the university to rebuild his professional life, re-energized by his experience and eager to embrace whatever time is left to him.
Moving and perceptive—a delightful, engaging memoir on aging.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59691-052-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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