A beautifully written book about a journey through wild places in the landscape and the heart.
British writer Norbury’s debut memoir takes readers on vigorous walks through lochs, rivers, and soggy marshes in Scotland, England, and Wales.
Adopted by loving parents and unable to identify, not for lack of trying, her birth parents, the author found that the inability to construct her family’s story left her “dizzyingly adrift,” living with her writer husband and their daughter Evie in both Spain and England. A miscarriage, as well as the loss of her father years before, deepened her loneliness. Inspired by Neil M. Gunn’s novel The Well at the World’s End, Norbury was intuitively drawn to the idea of walking from the mouth of a river to its source. For starters, she and Evie walked the banks of Afon Geirch, which runs into Cable Bay in Wales, where the family has a summer cottage. Though thwarted by fences and mud, she was not deterred. Following her expeditions could send readers to an old-fashioned atlas that includes the many bodies of water she encountered, including Dunbeath Water, near Spey, Scotland, where the “well at the world’s end” supposedly exists. Whether the well is real or fictional hardly matters. It’s the journey that counts. Norbury, whose background includes film editing for the BBC, stirs the imagination with descriptive passages—“Salt-white boulders lined a powdery shore of crystal sand, unmarked and clean, its whiteness stained to the colour of cork by the peat”—and her many digressions delight. For example, there is the tale of Boand, the goddess who went to seek a forbidden well in the land beyond her own, and that of her aunt’s flirtation (or was it an affair?) with a fisherman. All the stories circle back to themes of loneliness, yearning, and self-discovery. As the fish ladder enables salmon to swim upstream, Norbury’s treks helped her come to terms with the circumstances of her birth.
A beautifully written book about a journey through wild places in the landscape and the heart.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62040-995-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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