Sharp prose and exquisitely described images characterize a series of contemplative essays.
Vivian’s (English and Creative Writing/Alma College; Another Burning Kingdom, 2011, etc.) essays embrace consistent themes of calmness, simplicity and peace. The first essay, “Ghost Hallway,” sets the tone for the collection, introducing the spirit of a middle-aged woman Vivian returns home to each evening. She mentors him, slowing him down to see beauty in the ordinary. Readers will feel her touch woven throughout the book. In most of the pieces, Vivian paints vivid images then ruminates on why he is drawn to them: a red-robed bishop shows him how to walk with grace through “the vague malaise dripping like a bad faucet at the heart of town.” As compared to the perfect smiles of most Americans, the snaggle-toothed and ramshackle grins of the Turks signal that “perfection is not possible” and that “maybe there’s something even a little sinister in the very idea of a total whitewash.” The solace of a Laundromat, surrounded by the “smells of clean laundry, in the sudden bloom of hot air from an opened dryer,” portrays the beauty of shared mundane rituals. While many of these essays are set in Michigan or Nebraska, Vivian also takes us to the hills of Turkey, the Danube River, Auschwitz and an abandoned Jewish graveyard in Poland, journeys that demonstrate how disparate cultures broaden his perspective. Beautiful essays to read and savor one at a time.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8032-3431-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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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