Shepard’s mental energy is something to behold. He suggests more than once that “Those who know don’t talk / Those who talk...
A set of age pensées—complete with a CD arranging them to music—covering politics, music and living fully, from polymath publisher Shepard (The Reluctant Exhibitionist, 1994, etc.).
“What makes you think anyone would be interested in your opinions?” asks a friend of Shepard’s, and that’s a question that ought to be posed to any essayist. But there are a lot of things Shepard would like to get off his chest, and it’s rare that the unburdening doesn’t produce food for thought. Intimate, unrehearsed—Shepard recommends that readers take notice, asking them whether they’ve overstayed the interest and joy of their work, whether serenity—the ultimate prize of life, the Buddha state of mind—has gone begging? Shepard is here to tell them to take a risk, that money is no compensation for boredom, that one ought to pursue what’s personally meaningful, checking ego at the door, giving self-consciousness a holiday, taking aim at exploration and discovery despite all the inevitable missed notes. He is a student of his own medicine: he has run an elevator and squired a UPS truck; been defrocked as a psychoanalyst; experimented with drugs to unmoor his conventional thinking (and also lost a son to heroin). Shepard is a man of progressive politics, easily picking apart the war on drugs and the fatuous ravings of the Bush administration. As a partisan of compassionate, enlightened governing, he couldn’t have a better target than the war in Iraq and the flummery of the “Clean Skies,” “Job Creation” and “Save Our Forests” bills. He is wary of words, since so rarely can they get at the thrum of the matter; yet they can also be like a burr in the boot, irritating but demanding attention.
Shepard’s mental energy is something to behold. He suggests more than once that “Those who know don’t talk / Those who talk don’t know.” His words have an import worth considering.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-57962-117-1
Page Count: 142
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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