A much-needed treatise on renewing our relationship with the natural world, though the lack of a singular narrative thread...
A memoir recounting a Native-American woman’s spiritual connection with the landscape of the American Southwest.
In her latest work, Laguna Pueblo tribeswoman Silko (Gardens in the Dunes, 1999, etc.) philosophizes on humankind’s place within the natural world. From her Tucson home, the author defends the predators that surround her, depicting rattlesnakes and bees as welcome neighbors rather than harmful intruders. In one instance, when trying to free a rattlesnake from chicken wire, she notes that it “never rattled at me once the whole time it was trapped.” Likewise, she later boasts that while plucking near-drowned bees from the water, “[t]hey never try to sting me,” proof enough for Silko that bees, too, “understand kindness.” The author invites readers to reflect on their own trespasses against nature, while simultaneously sounding the call for a renewed relationship between the natural world and humanity. Silko’s love for landscape is reminiscent of John Muir, and her fastidious account offers a clear, sonorous voice for her wilderness. Her connection with her surroundings transcends the living world, and she argues that nature actually functions as a spiritual go-between linking departed ancestors with living relatives. “After death, it may take some days for the spirit to bid farewell to this world and to the loved ones they want to reassure,” writes Silko, “so they visit us as birds or other wild creatures to let us know that they are in a good place not far away.” While the self-assured vignettes are impressive, the book lacks a central narrative. The author’s world is overflowing with turquoise, snakes, dogs and rain, yet all of these individual components fail to offer the reader a cohesive story.
A much-needed treatise on renewing our relationship with the natural world, though the lack of a singular narrative thread may restrict the work from reaching the audience it deserves.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02211-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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