A fascinating, vividly written story about city and community that will change perceptions about the local farmers market.
Urban eccentricity meets rural thrift and tradition in a charming debut memoir about the author’s farm in downtown Oakland.
Carpenter, the progeny of two hippies whose attempt to go “back to the land” ended in near disaster, was drawn to farming yet unwilling to give up the cultural and intellectual perks of an urban environment: museums, bars, libraries, etc. Already an amateur apiarist and avid gardener, she moved with her husband from the Seattle suburbs to “Ghost Town” Oakland, attracted by its energy and diversity, undeterred by the nightly drive-bys. Of equal interest to the author was the garbage-filled abandoned lot next door. Soon, her visions of heirloom tomatoes, peach trees, fresh squash, even watermelons, became a reality. Inspired, she added a few chickens, then some ducks, geese, two turkeys, a few rabbits and two pigs. Carpenter found herself increasingly enveloped in the beautiful yet brutal circle of life that rules a farm. She gives heart-rending descriptions of her emotions when stray dogs killed one of the turkeys, but also admits that she intended to harvest the remaining bird for Thanksgiving dinner. In warm, witty prose, she describes feeding her livestock with scraps foraged from neighboring restaurants, as well as visits from local children, Vietnamese monks and eccentric neighbors, many of whom joined the author for meals and enjoyed the fruits of her labors. The special relationship between farmer and food was driven home for Carpenter when a local chef taught her traditional rural Italian techniques for harvesting every part of her pigs to create delicacies from headcheese and pork broth to prosciutto and salami. Experiencing Carpenter’s trials and tribulations, readers will get an honest portrait of where meals come from and an understanding that connecting with the food chain, even in the smallest ways, can enrich the palate and the soul.
A fascinating, vividly written story about city and community that will change perceptions about the local farmers market.Pub Date: June 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59420-221-6
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
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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