A broad sampling of deeply impressive writings—essays, memoirs, poetry, letters, stories—by women from the Southern Highlands, edited by Dyer (In a Tangled Wood, not reviewed). If the word Appalachia conjures little more for you than mining disasters and Walker Evans photos, turn these pages and discover the remarkable storytelling tradition that flourished there, and thrives still. Every one of these 35 pieces goes down smooth as a glass of Georgia peach, even when it bites. A few of the names of the contributors will be familiar—Nikki Giovanni and Gail Godwin, Jayne Anne Phillips, whose offering is a terrific out-of-time remembrance of her hometown, circa 1962—but most of the women here (all were born in the 20th century) have toiled long and hard, often in obscurity, their love of words keeping the storytelling art alive—and high art it is. Each writer was asked to address how the Appalachias had affected them (whites, African-Americans, and Native Americans are represented). There are good doses of the stubborn, rooted poetry of attachment by Kathryn Stripling Byer, Rita Sims Quillen, and others. Lou V.P. Crabtree, a certified old soul, tenders a stark, lyric portrait of Price Hollow; Hilda Downer’s depiction of Bandana—“named for the red bandana Clinchfield Railroad tied to a laurel branch to denote an imaginary train station”—is more sensuous. Denise Gardinia tells of losing her innocence to grammar, and Ellesa Clay High takes readers on a tour of her home patch through a “soft female rain that can last for days here’something we share with Seattle and other places.” There are 26 others, each as deserving of mention as the next. This collection won the 1997 Appalachian Studies Award—likely hands down, and deservedly so. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8131-2059-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
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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