An abiding devotion to a place and its inhabitants: sentimental in the right way, mnemonic, tempting.
Knopp (Creative Nonfiction/Goucher College) knows home in all its complexity, manifestations, and vicissitudes, and it’s found for her in southeastern Nebraska.
Twenty-two essays on aspects of home, companionable but distinct, linked by formal and personal lexicographic explorations, make up Knopp’s thoughts on “what is home, how one might find it . . . how the presence or absence of home affects the way one feels, thinks, and acts, both as an individual and a member of a community, society, or nation.” Home for Knopp is geographical, emotional, cultural, and portable (which doesn’t preclude homesickness but rather encourages it). And for her it arouses a protectiveness—for the tall-grass prairie of her home has been nothing if not tinkered with, from sod busters to river channelers, exploiting the land instead of shepherding it, losing balance, getting a surfeit of carp and along with it a dearth of sturgeon—an example of “the justice to extending the right to life and habitat to all creatures, with exceptions made on for dangerous bacteria or viruses.” But Knopp doesn’t often hedge her bets; she is devoted to the foxtail barley of the endangered salt marsh, to cold and lightning, meteors and wind, finding and creating a home in their midst. Humans, too, figure in her place, from the sense of “homewell,” where “you feel rooted, nurtured, aligned, synchronized, whole, plugged in, and flowing” (there are moments of such overwriting: “The collected essays seem to reveal a scheme, design, method, plan”), to the sense of deep community, tending to each other’s needs, growth, and expression. There are also instances of confusion—she’ll speak assuredly of “headmemory” (bound by image and language) and “body memory” (bound by sensation), then 30 pages later write that “even people who know better have a hard time letting go of the body-mind dichotomy.” Evidently, she should have known better.
An abiding devotion to a place and its inhabitants: sentimental in the right way, mnemonic, tempting.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-8032-2754-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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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