A mixed bag but useful for explaining the South to Yankees—and perhaps to some Southerners, too.
A Mississippi native returns to the South to revel in the “typically jarring contradictions” of Dixie.
Garden & Gun contributing editor Reed (Julia Reed's South: Spirited Entertaining and High-Style Fun All Year Long, 2016, etc.) logged time in newsrooms up North, but she found it necessary, in time, to get herself back home. Even though “it’s hot as hell, the mosquitoes are murderous, and we all might be half crazy,” there’s something about the region that can’t be bottled up and carried away. In this scattering of essays, the author hits on some of the high points and plenty of the low, perhaps the lowest being the whole Honey Boo Boo thing, which a friend of hers characterized with rough poetic justice as “Peckerwood Mayhem.” For her part, Reed wryly notes the oddity of the fact that the show appeared on a network once called The Learning Channel. The author demonstrates an indexical bent, enumerating the things that make the South what it is: the highest incidence of diabetes, a still-high number of cigarette smokers, “the most violent crime, the most guns, and the most shooting deaths.” In all this, she paints with a surprisingly broad brush given that the South is really a concatenation of Souths: Virginia is not Alabama is not Texas, despite some shared rounded vowels. Reed makes for a knowing commentator on debutante balls, pecan pies, and the relative merits of Scotch versus bourbon. Still, the collection sometimes hangs together too loosely, as if an excuse to pull together Reed’s columns from her magazine. There’s nothing terrible in it, but the disquisitions on such things as whether women should carry flasks (“they are also crucial to have on hand in times of stress, duress, or just plain boredom) and a playlist of Southern tunes (featuring, natch, “Sweet Home Alabama”) seem to be mostly filler.
A mixed bag but useful for explaining the South to Yankees—and perhaps to some Southerners, too.Pub Date: July 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-16634-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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