Dramatic but shallow.
Expanded from her series of articles in the Newark Star-Ledger, Pulitzer Prize finalist Fisher’s first book follows freshman roommates, badly burned in the January 2000 Seton Hall University dorm fire, as they recover and rebuild their lives.
Writing in a straightforward, reportorial style, the author chronicles the ordeal of Shawn Simons and Alvaro Llanos, illustrates their lighthearted personalities and loving friendship and rounds out the picture by including the perspectives of their families, the head of the burn unit at Saint Barnabas Hospital and the burn nurses. This action-driven, summarizing approach works well for straight narrative, but falls short in examining the complex psychological difficulties Shawn and Alvaro suffered after experiencing such a massive trauma so early in their lives. Essential questions are answered simplistically. What is it like for a carefree, handsome young man to be suddenly disfigured and to lose his youthful sense of invincibility? It’s difficult, the author tells us. How do parents cope when their beloved sons might die? Big surprise: Well-adjusted people do better than anxious ones. The author glosses over an unplanned pregnancy and the undercurrent of class conflict in the attendant arson case. Fisher’s heroic portraits of Shawn and Alvaro are similarly airbrushed; more recognition of their human fallibility would increase the text’s realism and impact. The strongest material deals with Alvaro’s 17-year-old girlfriend Angie, too young to deal well with the changes his injuries bring. Fisher’s account of their devolving relationship enhances readers’ emotional understanding of the fire’s effect on its victims in a way that the rest of the book does not.
Dramatic but shallow.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-316-06621-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
The acclaimed author of My Own Country (1996) turns his gaze inward to a pair of crises that hit even closer to home than the AIDS epidemic of which he wrote previously. Verghese took a teaching position at Texas Tech’s medical school, and it’s his arrival in the unfamiliar city of El Paso that triggers the events of his second book (parts of which appeared in the New Yorker). His marriage, already on the rocks in My Own Country, has collapsed utterly and the couple agree to a separation. In a new job in a new city, he finds himself more alone than he has ever been. But he becomes acquainted with a charming fourth-year student on his rotation, David, a former professional tennis player from Australia. Verghese, an ardent amateur himself, begins to play regularly with David and the two become close friends, indeed deeply dependent on each other. Gradually, the younger man begins to confide in his teacher and friend. David has a secret, known to most of the other students and staff at the teaching hospital but not to the recently arrived Verghese; he is a recovering drug addict whose presence at Tech is only possible if he maintains a rigorous schedule of AA meetings and urine tests. When David relapses and his life begins to spiral out of control, Verghese finds himself drawn into the young man’s troubles. As in his previous book, Verghese distinguishes himself by virtue not only of tremendous writing skill—he has a talented diagnostician’s observant eye and a gift for description—but also by his great humanity and humility. Verghese manages to recount the story of the failure of his marriage without recriminations and with a remarkable evenhandedness. Likewise, he tells David’s story honestly and movingly. Although it runs down a little in the last 50 pages or so, this is a compulsively readable and painful book, a work of compassion and intelligence.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-017405-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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