A politically charged meander down highways and byways, and just right for our time.
A lively, thoughtful memoir of being a stranger in a strange land.
Hough (Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing, 2021) cuts quite a figure at the outset: “a six-foot-tall lesbian with a haircut that had grown out a little from ‘lesbian going through some shit,’ but not enough,” wandering into the decidedly unhip confines of Shamrock, Texas, a little burg on the way to Amarillo. The people are nice, regardless of her unwonted appearance, she allows; but, back home in Austin, it’s getting ever harder to live in the old, weird ways the city was known for, now a place where a “murder shack” goes for a million bucks. Buying a van that “looked like it might belong to a retiree or a meth cook,” Hough hits the road in an approximation of the route John Steinbeck followed in Travels With Charley (1962), complete with a dog of her own named Woody Guthrie. Helpful Texas friends offered her guns for the trip, which she declines, though there are a few fraught moments awaiting her. More common are the simple puzzles of our time: why it should be, for instance, that Confederate flags should be flying in New Hampshire and at Plymouth Rock. Hough is cheerfully obscene: Describing the giant box-store-cum-gas-station that is Buc-ee’s, a staple of the South, she pegs it as “what might happen if a 7-Eleven fucked a Cracker Barrel.” But more, she is an astute observer, commiserating with the forgotten and left-behind people of the Ozarks and the Appalachians, their psychic wounds salved with opioids, and with the fieldworkers of Washington, paid barely enough to live and hounded by ICE. Concludes Hough, “I’m just one person who took a road trip with my dog. If I’ve got anything to say, it’s only this—I’m tired of blaming those with no power for all that’s gone wrong with our world.”
A politically charged meander down highways and byways, and just right for our time.Pub Date: June 16, 2026
ISBN: 9780593686621
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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