In need of trimming and occasional rethinking but with much promise as well.
A collection of essays on life in the unenchanting part of the Land of Enchantment.
There’s not much for young folks to do in the Tularosa Basin, a swath of the brown land of what Wheeler (Creative Writing/LSU) calls SNM—Southern New Mexico, that is, which is far from the glamorous climes of Taos and Santa Fe: “There is no easy way to explain that here in the underbelly, south of the 34th parallel, which cuts the state in half, things are different.” You can take drugs or go four-wheeling or go looking for UFOs or play video games—and be repaid by the video game company’s efforts to dump waste in your backyard, a story that rivals the tale of Karen Silkwood in circumstantial lethality if not toxicity. At their best, Wheeler’s essays limn this American outback and its unsettled and sometimes-unsettling ways: “Momma is at the hospital, getting her broken blood fixed again. We’re twelve, maybe, unsupervised and learning to get fucked-up. Choking each other out.” In a dusty rejoinder to Chuck Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City, Wheeler shows a fine eye for the stranger aspects of this country, from spaceports built before there are rocket ships to dock there to what he dubs “patrionoia,” a blend of patriotism and paranoia that “runs rampant in Southern New Mexico.” His account of digging ditches in the caliche soil to repair water lines is a masterpiece of proletarian wistfulness, calculated to make the reader sweat, and his accompanying notion that the water in those lines is haunted is a provocative one for any desert dweller. Still, the book runs much too long, and some of the essays are set pieces that don’t do much: The author’s take on the nuclear legacy of the region is unoriginal, and his foray across the line into Ciudad Juárez pales in comparison to the work of the late Charles Bowden.
In need of trimming and occasional rethinking but with much promise as well.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-53580-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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