Even when Morris is not on her A game, she still manages to convey her passionate longing.
Morris chronicles her journey to India, where she sought a tiger and found herself.
The author, who has won the Rome Prize in literature and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, has published multiple novels, story collections, and travel memoirs, including the acclaimed Nothing To Declare. At first blush, her latest seems rather thin and underrealized, its time-shifting format a distracting affectation. Soon, however, readers will acknowledge that this approach propels rather than disrupts the narrative flow even if some of Morris’ impressionistic asides seem like random thoughts. The author recounts her devastating ankle injury in 2008, arduous recovery, and the 2011 journey to India that took her all the way to the tigers. This last is a mostly uneventful tale, defined by a raging bronchial infection, bitter cold, and long periods of disappointment in the jungle. But Morris uses these longueurs to travel within, pondering the challenging relationship she shared with her parents, youthful self-doubts, old demons, and her not-always-seamless emergence as a writer. These passages arrive with disarming candor. Though the accounts of her travails preparing for and finally traveling in India seem rather ill-humored for a veteran globe-trotter like Morris, the savvy travel writer generally shines through. Her descriptions of the villages and cities on her route are characteristically honest, observant, and striking. Her reports on the nature of the Bengal tiger, as well as conservation efforts to restore its numbers, add to our understanding of the animal and its place in the human imagination. For Morris, the restless child who became a restive traveler, the adventure is always about seizing the moment, impermanence, and escape. "Real travelers, like real writers, move through the world like a child,” she writes. "With a child's sense of wonder and surprise. To move as if you’ve never been somewhere before, even if you’ve been there a thousand times.”
Even when Morris is not on her A game, she still manages to convey her passionate longing.Pub Date: June 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54609-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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
PERSPECTIVES
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