Most collections of previously published essays are necessarily uneven. This one is no exception, but the best pieces are...
An essayist focuses on family dynamics and the mortality that challenges us all.
Crenshaw (co-author: Text, Mind, and World: An Introduction to Literary Criticism, 2007) teaches writing at the university level, and the best of these essays, previously published in the Southwest Review, the Rumpus, and elsewhere, provide textbook examples of the craft. Perhaps the best is “Choke,” a series of sleight-of-hand fragments through which the author shows students (and readers) how to distinguish among “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This essay only meets one of those requirements.” As the narrative proceeds, hopscotching across chronology, it reveals Crenshaw’s responsibility in a different way than the matter-of-fact earlier passages had suggested, showing how “in court that would be a lie of omission. In an essay it’s called craft.” The author is a consummate craftsman, whether of concision (the two-page “Where We Are Going”) or in a longer illumination of the elliptical slipperiness of truth: “After the Ice,” which is likely about a murder in the family. A couple of the lesser pieces seem like writing exercises—e.g., about walls (“A Brief and Selected History of Man, Defined by a Few of the Walls He Has Built”) or food (“The Giving of Food”). Many of these essays focus on what it means to be a man from the perspective of someone who was raised in the South, served in the military, and drinks too much, but the title piece shows just how difficult it can be to sustain that hard-boiled persona. “When the shadows start to run together,” he writes, “we will regret the end of this day….We will think of all the time we have wasted, the savings accounts we haven’t yet started, the family members we haven’t visited in years.”
Most collections of previously published essays are necessarily uneven. This one is no exception, but the best pieces are worthy of inclusion in the Best American Essays series.Pub Date: March 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8142-5521-6
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Mad Creek/Ohio State Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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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