An investigation into religion, science and life from debut author Kleenoff.
Writing a book in an attempt to reach his own conclusions to many of the larger questions in life (e.g., What is God?), the author presents a tome of extensive proportions. Tackling topics as diverse and difficult as the existence of God, the mechanisms of evolution and the rearing of children, the book makes for a compendium of questions, answers and more questions. Race, homelessness, addiction and the Israeli-Arab conflict all receive attention. Sources include Stephen Hawking, Phil Donahue, The American Heritage Dictionary and an anonymous anti-Semitic blog (in a portion which dissects and criticizes anti-Semitism). The conclusions reached tend to be as disparate as the topics. A God figure as presented by mainstream religions is largely dismissed, though the existence of a God of some kind is by no means ruled out. Science is deemed vital to understanding mankind, though it is not without its ambiguities. As a layman, the author is keen to point out that which appears contradictory or confusing, such as with the Big Bang Theory: “According to conservation law, energy…cannot begin from nothing. Yet this is exactly what scientists are trying to justify when theorizing that the universe stemmed from a tiny point that turned into billions of galaxies.” Obvious at times (such as with this note on child rearing: “Although adolescence from the point of education is often the most rebellious and difficult period of a life span, the preceding age periods should not be neglected”), the book functions as an introduction to world religions, a polemic on evolution and a blunt investigation of Soviet society (“While people felt proud of having the first man sent into space, they did not much enjoy the rest of reality, finding very little improvement in the remainder of their lives”). Having formed such opinions over a lifetime, the book creates a feeling of conversing with the author. How readers will react to this conversation depends on how willing they are to listen. That the author writes with absolute care and earnestness, however, never comes into question.
Vast and questioning, the book explores a variety of topics with a concise dedication.
Pub Date: May 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499010275
Page Count: 558
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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