A deep reverence for nature shines throughout Russell’s rich, enjoyable text.
The author weaves together an account of a single year in rural New Mexico with a history of the pantheistic tradition from ancient Greece to the present day.
Russell (Creative Writing/Western New Mexico Univ.; Hunger: An Unnatural History, 2005, etc.) opens with a quote from Marcus Aurelius: “Everything is interwoven, and the web is holy.” This nutshell definition of pantheism is expanded upon but not superseded in the pages that follow. Russell lives in New Mexico’s Gila Valley, next to a Nature Conservancy wildlife refuge and near an ecological research center where visiting scientists involve amateur naturalists in research projects along the Gila River. She describes netting and banding birds, hiking the Sacaton Mesa, stargazing, encountering wild javelinas, observing sand hill cranes, butterflies and the native loach minnow. In this setting, she readily imagined that she was walking through the “Mind and Body of God,” but that wasn’t so easy to do in less felicitous surroundings. Pantheism, Russell found, could be a lonely business; at times she mourned the loss of a personal God and felt envious of those with faith in prayer. Meanwhile, she attended Quaker meetings, where she found a welcoming, comfortable community. With some misgivings, she experienced their hour of silence and pondered her compatibility with the Society of Friends’ religious philosophy. Russell weaves into this personal journal a selective history of pantheism in which she examines the writings of Aurelius, Baruch Spinoza, Giordano Bruno, Walt Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, among others. She also looks at elements of pantheism in Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, as well as in the works of contemporary authors who describe themselves variously as holistic scientists, religious naturalists or deep ecologists.
A deep reverence for nature shines throughout Russell’s rich, enjoyable text.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-465-00517-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
