by Jennifer McGaha ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2018
McGaha offers plenty of detail about life with a tiny herd of goats, but readers will finish the book with more knowledge...
A couple’s massive tax debt leads them to move to a cabin in the North Carolina woods.
McGaha began not with a romantic desire to return to the wild but with a foreclosure on the suburban house she and her accountant husband were buying from friends and a bill from the IRS for unreported back taxes in the six-figure range. Her determinedly upbeat memoir follows the couple and their dogs to a run-down cabin in the mountains of western North Carolina. The setting was idyllic, but for someone used to the pleasures of upper-middle-class living, the housing situation was less than ideal. The house, filled with the “thick, pungent odor” of mold, had green camouflage carpet “on the ceiling,” a barely functioning bathroom, countless mice, and a constant influx of snakes attracted by those mice. McGaha gradually forgave her husband for lying to her about their financial situation, and she achieved some happiness with the purchase of a few goats and chickens. She learned how to make goat cheese and breed the goats, with a few misadventures along the way. While she describes her experiences with the animals in vivid detail, the narrative often rambles. A long section about her life with her abusive first husband seems to have been shoehorned in, and she glosses over some of the deeper problems the author and her husband created for themselves, their college-aged children, and their friends. Many of the recipes that conclude the chapters are not detailed enough to be useful, particularly the one for Crock-Pot goat milk soap, which involves “9.56 ounces 100 percent pure lye” and some unspecified “protective gear.” The book also includes a reading group guide.
McGaha offers plenty of detail about life with a tiny herd of goats, but readers will finish the book with more knowledge about the outer lives of the chickens, goats, and dogs than the inner lives of their human owners.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4926-5538-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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Pulitzer Prize Finalist
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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