Honest and entertaining, this book forces readers to confront the systems of inequality in which we are all implicated.
One privileged LA couple tastes the labyrinthine magnitude of the city’s homelessness epidemic when they invite one of those chronically affected to live in their backyard guest cottage.
Konik (Report From the Street: Voices of the Homeless, 2018, etc.), an ex–professional gambler, and his wife, jazz singer Charmaine Clamor, have tired of their lives of material success. They have reoriented themselves away from the pursuit of fame and fortune to that of healing, creativity, and community building. “Maybe the better angels of our nature aren’t as distant and inaccessible as most of us imagine,” muses Konik. “Maybe all that’s required to access and embrace these angels is to decide consciously and willfully that we’ve got everything we’ll ever need, with plenty of extra to share.” When Fisher King Mike, a local man who suffers from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and chronic homelessness, comes to them for help, they trepidatiously begin a process of trust-building that starts with Mike’s bags camping out behind their hedge. Two years later, he’s become part of the family. To the book’s credit, all parties behave in a deeply human manner. Mike proves himself to be an excellent handyman but struggles with reliability and his cadre of inner demons. Konik and his wife waffle between their generosity and their distrust, their resistance to having their space and routine disturbed and their concerns about Mike’s hygiene. Though Konik’s dialogue can be wooden as he translates his narration from the stage to the page (he’s currently a comedian as well as a writer), and lapses into self-promotion or melodrama sometimes distract the reader from the bigger issues at stake, Konik has an amusing storytelling style that keeps the pages turning.
Honest and entertaining, this book forces readers to confront the systems of inequality in which we are all implicated.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63576-729-2
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Diversion Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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