The author clearly takes her craft seriously, and given the intermittent flashes of promise shown here, hopefully she...
A young essayist with a flair for poetic imagery offers a rites-of-passage collection that could almost be a memoir with a few more dots connected.
Baxter writes often about weather and emotional weather and frequently sees correspondence between the two. The combination is most powerfully dramatic in “From the Blue,” about a thunderstorm that electrocutes a young man working in the fields and the profound effect this has on both the essayist and the closely knit community: “We live on this little island of land, surrounded by waterways, the rivers, the lakes, and oceans, the streams below us, the aquifers. Bodies break and return to water and carbon. We all run out, eventually to the sea or rise up into the clouds.” In the title essay that serves as the collection’s centerpiece, the author writes with more edge and depth than she brings to the rest of the pieces, which mainly seem to concern a series of complicated romances, further complicated by what’s inside her head, culminating in the marriage that is the least detailed of these relationships (and the least romantic), quickly followed without explanation by divorce. It doesn’t bode well when she describes her relationship with the man who will become her husband with a tone that barely rises above resignation: “We are past the point of convincing ourselves that this is love. Which is a relief to some extent, like letting someone know your real name. It was nice having something noble to fight for but at least this is honest, as honest as we need it to be.” However, he may not have been past that point, or at least he likely wasn’t when he proposed marriage. Readers will be happy to learn in the acknowledgments, though not the essays, that love has finally gone right for Baxter, who now has a fiance she thanks “for inspiring me daily to live boldly.”
The author clearly takes her craft seriously, and given the intermittent flashes of promise shown here, hopefully she continues to work on it.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68003-172-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Texas Review Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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