Wry, graceful commentary on the oddity of the human condition.
A British writer in search of solitude takes two epic train journeys across the US, only to find herself inexorably drawn into a community of strangers.
Despite an initial claim that her ideal methodology for a travel book would be “to stay at home with the phone off the hook, the doorbell disconnected, and the blinds drawn,” Diski (Skating to Antarctica, 1995, etc.) determines to explore her inner landscape by taking a journey to nowhere in particular and books herself passage on a freighter from England to America, where she takes an Amtrak train from Florida to Tucson. A year later, she returns once more to circumnavigate the US by rail. The three journeys are bound up into a single narrative with two constants: the author’s need to find the smoking car, and the inevitability of connection with her fellow travelers. Be it in the dining room of the freighter where she learns of the death of another passenger’s son, on a train platform in Sacramento where a fellow named “Big Daddy” teaches her a dance routine from The Sound of Music, or in a smoking car where the attributes of leprechauns and pixies are debated, Diski is constantly rediscovering the dangers and seductions of spending time with others. In this temporary and happenstance community, she finds, people's stories tend to tumble out in the first few minutes of conversation. And as the scenery slides by—North Dakota prairie, southwestern desert, southern sugar-cane fields—the author makes a parallel journey through the scenery of her past, visiting the unhappy rooms of her childhood, the psychiatric wards and foster homes of her adolescence. Somehow, this weight of memories and current tragedies (a large number of her fellow travelers seem to be going to or coming from funerals) is anything but oppressive.
Wry, graceful commentary on the oddity of the human condition.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28352-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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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