Written with an incandescence that would make a beacon proud, in prose turned and tempered by an interlude of 30 years...
Artist and critic Hill’s spry, fittingly outlandish account of his six months as a lighthouse keeper on three islands off the west coast of Scotland.
“Before I took the job I didn’t really think through what a lighthouse keeper actually did,” admits Hill, whose marvelous prose recalls Michael Caine’s flavorsome voiceover for The Man Who Would Be King. In 1973, Hill was a freshly minted art student, 19 years old, looking for something out of the way. “We will pay your return fare to Edinburgh,” came the eager reply to his inquiry about a lighthouse keepership, “and sure enough there was a tiny claim form, hand typed, attached with a small gold paperclip.” What came next were stints on three distant islands—and you would have to be a hard soul not to recognize the magic in Pladda, Ailsa Craig, and Hyskeir, where Hill learned the jack-of-all-trades life: how to wind a light like a grandfather clock; how to sleep in two-hour intervals, savoring that sleep as if it was a fine wine; how to cook (he would become intimately acquainted with haggis), for food is the lubricant that keeps the lights turning; how to practice the fine, unconventional art of living in close quarters with the other keepers, three or four to a house. Conversation with his peers was as nourishing as the meals, and Hill has come to think that mandatory lighthouse training “would be enough to re-invent society” in the pacifistic, organic sense he admires. Sadly, “as I write this there are no longer any manned lighthouses around the coast of Britain. . . . It’s a damn shame and it makes you want to cry.”
Written with an incandescence that would make a beacon proud, in prose turned and tempered by an interlude of 30 years between the act and the telling.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-84195-546-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
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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