A slow, sweet homage to two Midwestern towns.
A collection of memories and narrative vignettes that chronicles the vibrant people who populated rural Wheaton and Rocky Comfort, Missouri, between 1907 and 1960.
Lewis paints, in alternating broad and fine strokes, a picture of a small segment of the rural United States through difficult and prosperous eras. He has an eye for satisfying detail, and he thoroughly catalogs a colorful cast of characters (a bevy of endnotes that reference hundreds of local news articles, periodicals, and more). The author uses memoir and journalistic reporting to show how his personal history maps onto his neighbors’ in two towns where there were no true strangers. The titular jar flies are said to sound like “a bad bass fiddle player sawing a grating note,” a constant buzzing presence that nearly suggests itself as the rural drama’s Greek chorus. Some of the most rewarding sections of the book explain the inner workings of Wheaton and Rocky Comfort’s agrarian systems, including the processes of supply bartering and community support for the infirm or downtrodden. At one point, Lewis fondly remembers a man named Mack Harader who’d given him a ride in his truck as a boy, and who was supported in financial and moral ways by his neighbors after a paralyzing stroke left him nearly immobile. Plenty of action abounds in stories about a grizzled cowboy, a fighter pilot, and other archetypically unyielding and tough players. The sheer volume of people tends at times to dilute the book’s sense of singular storyline. Instead, this set of tales should be enjoyed with the same patience and deliberation that one might have when listening to the flowing oral histories of family members on a back porch. Like such stories, this collection is meandering at times but rich in visual detail and warm language. While not a strictly journalistic endeavor, this book will still provide readers with a comprehensive look at this rural region’s history.
A slow, sweet homage to two Midwestern towns.Pub Date: June 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-6664-4
Page Count: 458
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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