The nonsequential entries make it difficult to chart Hopper’s growth, but that isn’t her game. In this lively and funny...
Down but not out in the hardscrabble Chicago of the 2000s.
Pitchfork writer Hopper (The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, 2015, etc.), who was also a music consultant for This American Life, freestyles her way through the past in this spirited random-access journal of her Chicago days in the early 2000s, when she struggled to get by while taking in the sights. There’s the guy on the roof, peeing into a duct (“Does he know where that duct goes?...Is he a handyman who hates his job?...Is our duct next?”), and the disappointed evangelical who finally loses it. (“Whuddup, bitch? Why didn’t you take a pamphlet? You can just ignore him like that? Huh? Beeitch!”) Hopper mostly got around by bike or foot, subsisted on crummy jobs, attended concerts, and fell in and out of relationships that left her buoyant or bummed out (“I think he thought I was just being vindictive for that time he ruined 1997-2002”). The author doesn’t just observe; she also asks the right questions: “You know how some nights you leave the house wanting to milk summer for all it’s worth, but all you get is a good glimpse at the rotten soul of the universe as it exists in and outside of yuppie jazz discos?” The weather was often unforgiving—“everyone is feeling the deep funk of winter’s bitch turn”—but the city was not: “It is profoundly comforting to live in a city that doesn’t give a shit and loves you how you are, because it is every bit as marred, bereft, and cocky as you are.”
The nonsequential entries make it difficult to chart Hopper’s growth, but that isn’t her game. In this lively and funny collection, she bears vivid witness to an industrial punk landscape that is both crumbling and evolving beneath her bare feet.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4773-1788-4
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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
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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