A fine work of environmental literature that demands a tolerance for detail and should inspire others to follow suit.
Let land lie fallow, and things begin to happen. Let 3,500 acres lie fallow, and the world is remade.
The lands around Knepp Castle, in the English district of West Sussex, have been farmed intensively for centuries, and the estate was exhausted and was losing money. Enter the aptly named Tree (The Living Goddess: A Journey Into the Heart of Kathmandu, 2015, etc.) and her husband, Charles Burrell. Three decades ago, they came to the land with a pronounced fondness for mycorrhizae—the invisible, microbial life that teems in healthy soil, fed by decaying plant life, sheltered by tree snags, and the like—and a commitment to do something about the declining populations of species such as the turtledove, whose numbers are “an almost vertical dive” thanks to the wholesale industrial remaking of the British countryside. Tree describes the long, laborious process of turning back time, abandoning deep plowing and mass production in the effort to allow the land to regain some of its former health. And how it does: As she writes, triumphantly, just one sign is the “sixty-two species of bee and thirty species of wasp” that now buzz around locally as well as 76 species of moths and battalions of birds, including herons that “deserted their tree-top roosts in the heronry and were nesting a few feet above the water.” The author writes without fear of binomials and with long asides into hard science and deep descriptions of things like soil types and the characteristics of heritage pig species, and fans of Roger Deakin, Robert Macfarlane, Nan Shepherd, and other British naturalists will follow right along. Tree describes a success that she began to chart nearly two decades ago but that has been flourishing since: “The land, released from its cycle of drudgery, seemed to be breathing a sigh of relief. And as the land relaxed, so did we.”
A fine work of environmental literature that demands a tolerance for detail and should inspire others to follow suit.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68137-371-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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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