Plenty authentic: a graceful addition to the literature of the American West, and a pleasure to read.
A lyrical memoir of country life, and a requiem, of sorts, for one of the last best places.
Story-writer Rember (English/Albertson Coll.; Cheerleaders from Gomorrah, 1994, etc.) opens his narrative with an invitingly well-handled anecdote from his youth involving a chance encounter with Ernest Hemingway on a snowy Idaho lane. It ends sadly, as indeed did Hemingway’s life, but also with a matter-of-fact simplicity that perfectly fits its rural setting: tragic though it may be, life goes on, and so do our stories. Now in his early 50s, Rember weaves past and present, dropping in here to recall his trapper/fishing-guide father’s efforts to carve a living out of wilderness, there to ponder what became of that wilderness once the word got out to Hollywood that the skiing there was good and the people compliant; among the sometimes spectral characters who figure in his pages are a dissatisfied banker friend who is forever trying to convert Rember to the cause of making money; another friend who, having suffered a brain injury in a climbing accident, slowly rebuilds his memories and skills; and a student with a “not-very-good brain” who, before Rember’s eyes, ruins a car that cost well more than he earns in a year. From these and other figures fine and flawed, Rember draws moral lessons rendered in nicely epigrammatic, often humorous turns: “I had learned that the magic can fall out of things and that you can be involved in rites of passage that turn out to be all about somebody else.” “Bliss, Idaho, is just like Saudi Arabia. . . . Except in Bliss, the wind blows harder and the people aren’t any fun.”
Plenty authentic: a graceful addition to the literature of the American West, and a pleasure to read.Pub Date: July 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-42207-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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
PERSPECTIVES
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