Childhood memories with a nightmarish tinge.
An Appalachian memoir suffused with atomic energy.
Early on in this brief narrative, Freeman (Sociology/Simon Fraser Univ.; Longing for the Bomb: Oak Ridge and Atomic Nostalgia, 2015) writes, “I want to revive a peculiar genre—sociological poetry,” a term she attributes to C. Wright Mills in describing James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. This book is substantively different than Agee’s, though it has plenty of photos (Agee collaborated with the famed photographer Walker Evans), drawings, and assorted cultural references. It is more like a tone poem, a slim volume filled with very short sections—vignettes, memories—that seem to follow no chronological pattern yet keep circling back to the fact that in her grandparents’ hometown of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, nuclear power was ubiquitous, like oxygen, so you barely noticed it. It was only in retrospect that the author realized the deadly connection between this “secret city engineered by the United States government,” with the deceivingly pastoral name, and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima. “For those of us in its orbit,” she writes, “its spinning is our spinning; its hard acorn body, always already full of future potential, is also our collective body, as we embody culture and place.” Within the book’s analytical orbit, Walter Benjamin and Icarus connect with R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” and Adam Bomb from the Garbage Pail Kids finds something of a kindred spirit in the comic-book superhero Captain Atom. Readers also learn that the co-founder of Waffle House “worked as a counterintelligence agent for the U.S. government during the Manhattan Project,” and the author’s own grandfather was an atomic courier, driving his truck full of secret cargo. The result is by no means an anti-nuclear polemic, but the cumulative impact of the matter-of-fact sections gives readers a Cold War chill at the cultural pervasiveness of such destructive energy.
Childhood memories with a nightmarish tinge.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5036-0689-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Redwood Press/Stanford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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
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
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