A thoughtful reflection on life, marriage, and child-rearing told from a unique perspective.
A memoir about a couple who were inspired by anti–Vietnam War sentiments and the return-to-nature movement of the 1970s to pull up stakes in the American Midwest and make a new life in Canada.
Nothing in their upbringing prepared the author and her husband for their future adventures when, in 1972, they bought a 300-acre farm in Echo Bay in northern Ontario. They had moved from America to Canada four years earlier, after learning that the baby they were expecting would not exempt Jack Dunning from the Vietnam draft. Now, they were fulfilling a dream of becoming homesteaders. In this evocative remembrance, Dunning (Education in Canada, 1997) looks back at how she, a young woman from a middle-class Quaker family in Pennsylvania, and her spouse, a young man from a wealthy family in Connecticut, wound up raising goats, chickens, and cattle and learned, often painfully, the difficulties of plowing, planting, harvesting, and baling. In addition to doing such fieldwork, Jack had a position teaching psychology at Algoma College in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Dunning, meanwhile, took care of their three small children (Erica, Robin, and Galen), gathered eggs, tended the vegetable garden, fed and watered the livestock, and milked the goats, among other tasks. They also ate what they raised, as they were dedicated to the idea of caring for the planet. The chores seemed endless, though, and after 15 years of them, the Dunnings finally decided that it was time to devote their energies to other things. Dunning regales readers with some wonderful, funny vignettes, telling of Alexander the ram attempting to mate with every cow in heat or Jack trying to recapture a flyaway turkey. These are counterbalanced by the pall of animals dying while giving birth or getting killed by wolves or farm machinery. The author’s eldest daughter, who was always closest with the animals, is shown to be most affected by their loss: “Everything dies here,” she cried when her dog was tragically killed in a beaver trap. At one point, following an account of the death of a cat, Dunning poignantly muses: “losing animals hadn’t gotten any easier for Erica. It had become troublesomely easy for me, I thought, as I looked at her stricken, tear-stained face.” Although the book generally moves through the years sequentially, it also jumps around a bit, as one memory or another makes its way to the forefront. (Today, all the animals are gone and the fields are now worked by others, but the Dunnings still live on the same land.) Through it all, however, the author insightfully questions her path, juxtaposing her life choices against her expectations of being a “liberated” woman of the 1970s and ’80s: “Our lives create us as much as we create them. Mine created a farm wife, yes. It also created an endless search for self-definition, a conflicted stay-at-home mom, a dreadful businesswoman, and finally, a wordsmith.”
A thoughtful reflection on life, marriage, and child-rearing told from a unique perspective.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-988394-00-8
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Blurb
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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