A rather dull memoir from a gifted writer.
A young man heads for the hills to experience solitude.
Cognetti follows up his international bestselling novel, The Eight Mountains (2018), with this amiable and pleasant but lackluster memoir. At the age of 30, writes the author, he was “drained, disoriented, and disillusioned,” and he yearned to “recover an old and deep-seated [self] I felt that I had lost.” Inspired by Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild and Thoreau—“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately...”—Cognetti set off for the Alps in search of his lost, “wild” boy-ness. However, readers take note: There will be no exciting near-death experiences here, just reflective thoughts. The author rented a small hut in the lower Alps, some 6,000 feet above sea level in the Valle d’Aosta. He tells his story chronologically, from winter, the “season of sleep,” to the “solitude and observation” of spring, to summer, the “season of friendship and adventure,” to autumn, the “season of writing.” After settling, Cognetti began to explore, but the landscape felt “artificial.” There’s “no such thing as wilderness in the Alps, only a long history of human presence that is experiencing today an era of abandonment.” After dealing with some mid-May snow, the author encountered his first guest, his landlord, Remigio. As the snow melted, Cognetti chopped wood and planted a vegetable garden. He observed the wildlife around him, including eagles, hares, marmots, chamois, and roe deer. When the shepherds returned to their pastures with cows, he made new friends. Eventually, he realized he “wasn’t cut out to be a hermit.” We read about his walks, preparing meals, enjoying wine; and still, “I had not learned how to be alone.” In autumn, he began writing in his notebook and hid some notes “in broken rocks, in the split bark of trees, so that my words would still be there after I’d gone.”
A rather dull memoir from a gifted writer.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9671-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Washington Square Press/Atria
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!
It should come as no surprise that the gifted author of The Sea Around Usand its successors can take another branch of science—that phase of biology indicated by the term ecology—and bring it so sharply into focus that any intelligent layman can understand what she is talking about.
Understand, yes, and shudder, for she has drawn a living portrait of what is happening to this balance nature has decreed in the science of life—and what man is doing (and has done) to destroy it and create a science of death. Death to our birds, to fish, to wild creatures of the woods—and, to a degree as yet undetermined, to man himself. World War II hastened the program by releasing lethal chemicals for destruction of insects that threatened man’s health and comfort, vegetation that needed quick disposal. The war against insects had been under way before, but the methods were relatively harmless to other than the insects under attack; the products non-chemical, sometimes even introduction of other insects, enemies of the ones under attack. But with chemicals—increasingly stronger, more potent, more varied, more dangerous—new chain reactions have set in. And ironically, the insects are winning the war, setting up immunities, and re-emerging, their natural enemies destroyed. The peril does not stop here. Waters, even to the underground water tables, are contaminated; soils are poisoned. The birds consume the poisons in their insect and earthworm diet; the cattle, in their fodder; the fish, in the waters and the food those waters provide. And humans? They drink the milk, eat the vegetables, the fish, the poultry. There is enough evidence to point to the far-reaching effects; but this is only the beginning,—in cancer, in liver disorders, in radiation perils…This is the horrifying story. It needed to be told—and by a scientist with a rare gift of communication and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Already the articles taken from the book for publication in The New Yorkerare being widely discussed. Book-of-the-Month distribution in October will spread the message yet more widely.
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1962
ISBN: 061825305X
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1962
APPRECIATIONS
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