Katz, a much-published writer of mystery novels and nonfiction (Virtuous Reality, 1997, etc.), prematurely assays the genre of spiritual autobiography. In the spring of 1997, the author purchased a mountain cabin in the upstate New York town of Cambridge and lived there for six months. His purpose was, in the relative solitude of rural New York state, to uncover new goals and meanings for his life, which had become stultifyingly routine in his (unspecified) suburban New Jersey town. An understanding wife and daughter consent to the temporary separation, though the three remain in close touch throughout by phone. The spiritual guide for this mountain sojourn is Thomas Merton, who supplies, in Katz’s interpretations, a sometimes sad, middle-aged wisdom and with whom the author carries on imaginary conversations. (Katz’s original intention had been to write a Merton biography.) Merton’s counsel, to seek the spiritual in life’s small everyday details, informs these pages, which counterpose accounts of cabin renovation, mouse removal, and well-digging with autobiographical reflections on childhood, family, career, friendship, and solitude. Katz is at his wry and winsome best on the material side of rural life, such as the critical home services provided by “big men in big trucks,” or learning to turn on the new well. But both Merton and the reader might wonder what constitutes the oft-cited spirituality of these reflections. Katz offers several definitions of the spiritual life—human-relatedness, happiness, self-discovery, openness to change—that seem more new-age than anything a Trappist monk might recognize, and that never wholly solidify. Accordingly, the authorial self that emerges as having attained to spiritual life is unfocused, awkwardly striding the never-resolved contradictions between responsibility and freedom, familial love and self-love, humility and self-praise. This suburbanite author’s self-deflecting appreciations of rural life appeal, but his spiritual ruminations should have been allowed quietly to mature a few years before finding their way to print. (First printing of 35,000)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-45678-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
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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