A charmingly eccentric sophomore effort.
A British memoirist and former artist gathers quirky personal essays about embarrassing personal predicaments in which “good intentions f[e]ll short.”
In her often amusing second book, Carew, whose first book, Dadland, won the 2016 Costa Biography Award, unabashedly highlights her unfortunate knack for attracting—or being attracted to—all manner of “mishap and misadventure.” She begins in 1976, the year she “bunked off school [and did] badly in my A-levels.” She flew to Toronto, where she met up with a friend named Ian, with whom she hitchhiked to Texas, where they made plans to travel South America in a VW Beetle they named Horace (“you give names to cars when you’re nineteen”). While on a camping trip in Lake Tahoe, the pair encountered a hulking former mercenary named Animal who showed them “bullet holes in his biceps and the scars on his chest” and made them flee, “too terrified to look back.” In the late 1980s, Carew careened into a long-term marriage with a New Zealander she had only met weeks before in London. Following their union, the pair flew to New Zealand. There, she stumbled into a short-lived career as a waitress and unknowingly ran into actor Sam Neill at a friend’s dinner party. Then the author’s peripatetic inclinations led her to Tunisia and, later, India, where she befriended local guides, one of whom adopted her husband as an “uncle,” tasking him with a proposed visit to the British internet girlfriend he wanted to marry. Carew’s misadventures also included many blunders at home in Britain, where she and her husband eventually settled: playing matchmaker for two “disaster-prone” friends; botching attempts at becoming a poet; and taking up gardening only to find that the act transformed her into a “constant murderer.” As the author chronicles how she all too often “ma[d]e a hash of [things],” Carew’s occasionally outlandish essays serve as witty reminders that laughter is very often the best—and sometimes only—defense against human foibles.
A charmingly eccentric sophomore effort.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78689-407-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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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