A worthy addition to Colorado literature.
Amiable, bookish wanderings along paths blazed by a genteel lady in the Rockies more than a century ago.
Root, a retired professor from Michigan, tracks the English travel writer Isabella Bird, whose A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains was published in 1879. Recounting a season’s exploration of the mining towns and byways above modern Denver, Bird’s book did not, as Root quietly notes, really describe “a life”—and other women had written about the region before Bird got there. But she hit the zeitgeist, and, as one later editor observed, gave early voice to the preservationist impulse that would lead to the protection of Estes Park and other places. Root writes more prosaically than Bird, who was given to bursts of Victorian purplishness, but he has a well-honed appreciation for such things as how the sky of the Great Plains meets the towering mountains. While admitting to a touch of acrophobia, he has no fear of traveling vertiginous mountain roads “strewn with fallen rocks the size and shape of urban telephone books” in pursuit of just the right all-commanding overlook. “I concede to her the prize for pluck and perseverance, for resolve and resilience,” he writes. “By comparison, I’m rather wussy and don’t intend to be otherwise.” Perhaps so, but Root is no slouch. It’s true that Bird traveled by horseback and Root by compact car and other motorized vehicles, but they share qualities and concerns, finding plenty of untraveled stretches of all-too-busy Colorado to write about and marveling at them. Root also does a nice job of bringing Bird to life by reminding readers of her relationship with a wily mountain man who appeared to her in a faraway vision on the night he was shot to death—“a quirky story,” he notes, that reminds us that Bird was “complex and problematic.”
A worthy addition to Colorado literature.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4018-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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