Brown’s honest, down-to-earth prose is always readable and sometimes moving, but most of the pieces here lack substance.
Ten autobiographical essays that read more like journal entries, by the King of Grit Lit (Fay, 2000, etc.), disappointingly not up to the level of Brown’s last nonfiction collection, On Fire (1994).
The title piece, originally released in 1997 as a 40-page art edition, is the collection’s high-water mark, a richly told story about Brown’s son’s hopes of becoming a cattle-farmer in spite of a never-ending string of bad luck. (The instance detailed here involves birthing two stillborn calves.) “By the Pond,” which describes taking eight acres from which Brown fished as a young boy, fixing them up, and putting a dock in the water, is also noteworthy. “Thicker Than Blood,” short but effective, returns to Brown’s frequent subject, hunting, to tell how the older men in his small-town community initiated him into the world of hunting and its “reserves of good memories,” filling in for the father who died when he was 16 (and who didn’t hunt anyway). Brown struggles but nearly gets it right with a couple of others: “Harry Crews: Mentor and Friend,” an account of his life as a writer and Crews’s huge influence on him, and “So Much Fish, So Close to Home: an Improv,” a highly original but unfocused and awkward tale in need of editing. “Chattanooga Nights,” touching for its aw-shucks description of Brown’s first invitation to a literature conference, feels redundant after “Harry Crews” and comes embarrassingly close to self-canonization with its invocation of Eudora Welty, William Styron, Ernest Gaines, and the like. Of the collection’s final three essays, two (“Goat Songs” and “Shack”) are fine but not noteworthy, and the other (“The Whore in Me”) is uninspired.
Brown’s honest, down-to-earth prose is always readable and sometimes moving, but most of the pieces here lack substance.Pub Date: April 13, 2001
ISBN: 1-56512-167-8
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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
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