A revealing, richly textured portrait of the lives of those who put food on our tables.
Literate travels in the forgotten American hinterlands.
Mockett (Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, 2015, etc.) is a child of “the coasts: seventeen years in California, four years of college in New York City, more years of ping-ponging between the East and West Coasts,” the kind of person likely to think of the territory in between as flyover country. Yet, with a Japanese mother and High Plains father, she knows that ground well, having spent summers on a family farm that spilled over from Nebraska into Colorado. The author returned to explore the work of itinerant contract or “custom” harvesters whose “routes across state lines were established by men, who handed down their itineraries to their sons, and harvesting became a family business.” Traveling with one such family across the center of the country, Mockett analyzes the divides between rural and urban, religious and apathetic or atheistic, conservative and liberal. Even in her own family, she writes, those differences were profound, but what is a bicoastal, educated person to make of someone who believes “that man was around at the time of the dinosaur”? Refreshingly, the author finds that conversation is just the thing; with it, some stereotypes shade away or at least become more complicated, as with that young fundamentalist who also maintained that if someone is pro-life, “they would help children, not just abandon them.” On the other hand, some farmers and harvesters spend their off time at the Omniplex, a sprawling science museum in Oklahoma City, and some hold education and the “uncharted world” in our minds in esteem while others hold the Bible to be the sole truth. What some city sophisticates dismiss as monoculture, many country people praise as progress. Throughout, Mockett’s portrait is nuanced, revealing those overlooked people in counties likely to have voted for the sitting president to be worth paying attention to.
A revealing, richly textured portrait of the lives of those who put food on our tables.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64445-017-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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