Fluidity and economy of style, a wit that crackles as it whispers. Every reader should experience Lewis.
In this last book before his death in 2003, Lewis amply demonstrates why peers and contemporaries hailed him as one of the finest travel writers in English in the last century.
In this story, Lewis and his brother-in-law Eugene visit Spain from England in order to travel to Seville to view the tomb of the Carvaljo family, Spanish ancestors of Lewis’s father-in-law, Ernesto (a “Sicilian man of honor”), and report on its condition. It is, as were most of Lewis’s 14 other nonfiction works, a travel story; in this case one by a 93-year-old writer recalling situations and events that occurred in 1934. Given that, the imagery from a country on the verge of civil war and of its own holocaust stands out as sharply as in a Robert Capa photograph. It’s not just that the author’s cogent observations are perfectly preserved, but also that he has so keen a sense of the dimensions of a culture that’s deep enough to withstand the misery of senseless war heaped upon what was for many contemporary Spaniards the misery of everyday life. Eugene and Lewis literally stroll through a nascent revolution—scheduled trains are not running; buses pocked with bullet holes may or may not hold to their routes. The only way to cross the street in Madrid without immediately becoming a sniper’s target, they quickly learn, is to walk like hordes of other pedestrians with arms fully extended into the air. A necessary 60-mile hike to Zaragoza to pick up ad hoc transport to Seville takes them through stark villages of cave dwellers, as well as mysteriously beautiful oak forests. But everywhere, from the bleakest villages to the grandest of ancient cities, there remains an overriding tradition of hospitality and the interchange of philosophies over bread and wine. Revolution or not, the pair press on to view the tomb in Seville.
Fluidity and economy of style, a wit that crackles as it whispers. Every reader should experience Lewis.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1439-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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