Firsthand recollections of communal spirit enliven a sometimes-slow text.
A family history that digs deep into an isolated Appalachian mining community.
Debut author Frazer grew up in the small mining community of Minden, West Virginia, when coal was still king in Appalachia. At the time of the 1950 census, 28 percent of the male population of Fayette County was employed in the mines, including Frazer’s father. This book offers a thoroughly researched, if somewhat plodding, family history that fondly recalls the camaraderie—and grime—of life in an isolated coal camp. Waste from the mines, she writes, was “piled high” on the hillside behind her house, “letting off a burning, stinky smoke constantly hovering over Minden....I remember thinking that this must be what I hear others talk about as Hell.” The first half of the book painstakingly describes the emigration of her ancestors from central Europe, their early struggles as farmers in Virginia, and the impact of the Civil War. There are some interesting revelations here; for example, Frazer’s sixth removed grandfather, a former indentured servant, owned slaves, and her grandfather joined the Ku Klux Klan, apparently “as a constructive way to ensure the safety of his family.” But the book’s dearth of local color and context makes for heavy reading. Things pick up, however, once the author, one of seven children, takes center stage; her firsthand presence lends some immediacy to the mining-town memories. The family’s home, she says, was company property and “Company houses in Minden eventually changed colors from white to gray as the coal dust, soot, and burning slate settled on the homes.” The outdoor toilet served all nine family members and many days they took “a bucket or pail of water, soap and wash cloth to take a ‘spit bath.’ ” On one occasion, Frazer’s brothers dug a hole to where they believed a neighbor was storing moonshine: “they find no moonshine. They do discover a usable toilet.” The Minden mines closed in 1955 and none of Frazer’s family members now work in the industry. But in this memoir, she tells of how the mining life “will always be part of us. Those ties are too strong to break.”
Firsthand recollections of communal spirit enliven a sometimes-slow text.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5049-7080-8
Page Count: 162
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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