This is travel literature as memoir, drolly covering the scope of a restless creative life.
An offbeat world tour with a not-quite-innocent abroad.
Novelist and essayist Freed (Emerita, English/Univ. of California; The Last Laugh, 2017, etc.) isn’t the type to get hung up on wondering “should I stay or should I go?” She gets the urge for going, and she’s gone. "As it happens," she writes, "I am at my most suggestible on the subject of belonging, because I am not much good at it." Wanderlust is what ties these funny and astute personal essays together; the book is about what it means to have an insatiable hunger for experience. Freed begins in, and frequently returns to, her homeland of South Africa, where she was born into a theatrical family amid the apartheid-era white bourgeoisie. She writes of the surface tension of revolt and how a mutual sense of distrust infects communication. A Zulu phrase book, for example, delivers commands with a Biblical tone, “intended to communicate to the servant that God is speaking.” Freed skewers an ecotourist camp where, she notes with a twinge of glee, a lioness devoured a camper. Maybe, she reasons, “had the lioness not lost her natural fear of Man while recovering from her capture experience, she might never have come anywhere near the camp.” In between visiting many countries over many years, Freed deals with love and mortality. There’s cancer, which transforms shopping: “I wonder whether I was drawn to soaps and gels because, unlike, say, a belt or a pair of shoes, they could be counted upon not to outlast me.” There’s infidelity: “I could not bear the thought of a life spent repeating itself in virtue.” And there is, finally, the clock ticking, as she considers how aging affects writing.
This is travel literature as memoir, drolly covering the scope of a restless creative life.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61902-927-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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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