Lanham memorably, vibrantly shows how choosing joy is an act of resilience, courage, and power.
Another luminous mixture of prose and poetry from Lanham.
“Miracles occur by evolutionary adaptation and seasonal migration,” writes Lanham, author of Sparrow Envy and The Home Place. On the same page, the author acknowledges that “people die by the police because their Black lives don’t matter.” The power of this book is in how well it holds the duality of these truths. We see that the pain created by humanity does not necessarily negate the beauty. Early on, he writes, “Be advised, every poem isn’t an ode to joy, and yes, sometimes there is sadness, or anger within the words.” Lanham is masterful at showing how, despite the struggles of climate change, war, and racism, among other societal ills, joy is present, and choosing to pursue delight in the face of injustice is a brave act. Throughout the book, the author excavates and elevates that joy. “Joy is the justice / we give ourselves. It is Maya’s caged bird / sung free past the prison bars,” he proclaims in the titular poem, demonstrating how the expression of that joy becomes a radical, even subversive act. In lush, sensuous prose, Lanham pursues joy in the backyard, with blackbirds “murmurating in an orange evening sky,” and in witnessing seasonal change. The author is both a naturalist and an agent of social justice, and this book is at its most poignant when these two meet, as in “Nine New Revelations for the Black Bird-Watcher”: “No one denies the eye-bending beauty of a painted bunting by saying, ‘I don’t see color’”; “Why are some immigrants accepted and others not? Asking for a European starling.” With his consistently engaging writing, keen eye, and generosity of spirit, Lanham is a writer to whom we should all listen closely.
Lanham memorably, vibrantly shows how choosing joy is an act of resilience, courage, and power.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9798885740302
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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
PERSPECTIVES
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