Despite its lack of cohesiveness, this memoir offers striking details about less-traveled locations and thought-provoking...
Anthropologist Layton (Street Women and the Art of Bullshitting, 2010, etc.) examines how different types of travel affect people's perceptions of culture and themselves in her scholarly debut memoir.
Layton begins by describing six categories of tourists: charter tourists, independent tourists, travel writers, drifters, embedded visitors and travelers at home. Different types of travelers experience local culture differently. To prove her point, Layton details her own encounters as a tourist from 1932 to 1998. Her destinations include Morocco, Cuba, Seychelles, Thailand, Venezuela, Spain, England and Canada. As an embedded visitor at the University of Havana in Cuba, she feels that her temporary colleagues are like "distant cousins fallen on hard times." In contrast, her experiences with incarcerated cultures, such as a penitentiary in her longtime home of Canada feel "more alien than any foreign land." Layton constantly offers rich, sensory details of her journeys, pointing out, for example, a trio of goats perched on an argon tree, the unpleasant sensation of sticking to plastic chairs in a humid climate or the sound of a woman banging on a hotel's elevator door. Her observations are a candid, smartly edited mix of positive and negative details. Layton's blend of historical, literary and political references throughout helps put her keen personal observations in context. (Many names, however, are not offered with any identifying titles or details, making them less accessible to nonscholars.) The final chapter, speculating on the idea of cruise ships replacing nursing homes for the elderly, is the weakest, lacking the realistic, memorable details that captivate the reader in earlier chapters. While the author readily compares her writing techniques to patchwork in the memoir's preface, the lack of transitions between chapters and no final summary chapter remains disconcerting.
Despite its lack of cohesiveness, this memoir offers striking details about less-traveled locations and thought-provoking commentary on the difficulties of understanding a culture other than one's own.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-1462036493
Page Count: 296
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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