A beautifully crafted ode to the South and the redemptive power of faith.
A collection of poetry offers a journey through the heart of the American South.
Amid the South’s lush landscape lies a world of stark contradictions—gentility and oppression, violence and faith. The South’s culture, with dialects and traditions that enrich daily life, leaves its imprint on all who call the region home. Through 39 poems, Boyd explores the mysteries of darkness and light that shaped his Southern relatives, who settled in Virginia in the 1600s and fled to Florida in the 1860s with the fall of their plantation. Grouping his poetry under the themes of “Southern Life,” “Wild Life,” and “Spirit Life,” the author reveals these elements to be deeply connected, representing the threads of his own odyssey. Opening with a glimpse at the travesty of slavery, Boyd examines the joys and sufferings of his family, childhood innocence, modern social values, troubled hearts, and the hope for salvation. But while unique facets of Southern life are spotlighted in the work, there is universal wisdom at its core, with verses in “A Proverb for Companionship” and “21 Beatitudes for the 21st Century” (“Treasured are the refugees, for they will be accepted into lands where their families can find freedom, safety, and nourishment”) that remind readers of their shared human experiences and blessings. Page after page, Boyd offers a compilation of evocative and graceful poetry. Drawing on various structures and lengths, the author’s free verse is easy to follow and filled with relatable messages for a modern audience. Even readers without a Southern connection will enjoy poems like “If I Had My Druthers”—a tribute to the region’s slang and the colloquialisms of Boyd’s beloved mother (“Sometimes, I declare, if things were crooked, they were just catawampus”). This love of close family ties is evident throughout his poetry, with the author’s grandmother and grandfather prominently featured (“Grandpa Roy smoked a pipe with a cloudy sigh of sweetness / Pipe smoke still kindles my fragrant memories of his mellow heart”). And while this affection is commingled with the struggle of accepting the world’s darkness, the work’s overall tone is hopeful. Concluding with a section on people’s relationships with God, Boyd stresses the everlasting light that guides individuals through confusion to the promise of unity.
A beautifully crafted ode to the South and the redemptive power of faith.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2023
ISBN: 9798887315782
Page Count: 98
Publisher: Fulton Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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