Quietly, hypnotically amusing.
Travel tales and mini histories collected in cemeteries across the Americas and Europe.
Given the gothic flavor that infuses Enriquez’s fiction, it is perhaps no surprise that the author is a “cemetery connoisseur.” In this essay collection, she pulls notes from visits to iconic graveyards across Europe, the United States, and South America, lightly lacing them with personal memoir and niche cultural interests (like the Welsh punk rock band Manic Street Preachers). This is not a simplistic account of morbid tourism. Instead, Enriquez constructs mental maps of notable interments, dedicated children’s zones, and funerary statuary with vivid scenic details that illustrate how surrounding landscapes affect the delicate beauty of gravestones and monuments. She staves off the creep of the macabre with entertaining sketches of the quirkily superstitious and grave robbers, partiers, and defacers and with little-known tidbits of idiosyncratic cemetery norms. (Who knew that most cemeteries of a certain size contain a person buried standing up?) While Enriquez visits each cemetery for the appeal of the site itself, each also has its own strange history, famous inhabitants, and unlikely ghost stories. And, it turns out, cemeteries, their origin stories of creation, exhumation, and relocation, the care of them, and the mysteries that shroud them, lend themselves to discussions of geopolitical history, religious inclinations, social delineations, and how we think about both the dead and death more generally. The author’s visits to cemeteries in Patagonia and on a remote island off the coast of Perth, Australia, create a spectral background for Indigenous-colonizer relationships and serendipitous nation-state boundaries; New Orleans’s famed mausoleums provide an entrée for explaining voodoo and noting class divides. Despite hints of deeper darkness, Enriquez’s almost protective devotion to the subject of her eerie obsession supplants juicy personal details and the rendering of moral judgments to shape an ode to material remembrance that is unusual, sometimes comical, and ultimately oddly comforting.
Quietly, hypnotically amusing.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733516
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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