Both an intensely lyrical and intimate scrapbook of familial history and a uniquely sublime travelogue of the American...
A debut memoir delivers a meditation on a writer’s Texas Panhandle homeland.
Armitage (The Post-2000 Film Western, 2016, etc.), a professor emerita of English and American Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso, begins her book with a return to her family home in Vega. Located in the middle of a sprawling prairie surrounded by acres of grassland, the area was settled by folks like her father, who arrived there at age 16 in 1926 with his family after being flooded out from their Arkansas delta farm. The author fondly describes the 32,000-square-mile Llano Estacado of her homeland as one of the largest North American plateaus and a place historically cultivated primarily by private ranches. Only briefly does the writer dip into her more recent ecological efforts, using government-funded conservation resources, to restore the native grasses and the natural wildlife habitats decimated from decades of farming. She questions what the land has to say and intends on discovering just that in an expansive series of hikes, beginning at her father’s Armitage Farms ranch and spanning miles to reach the cow camp of original cowboy and area settler Ysabel to “track the arc of their stories.” In a meandering, somewhat repetitive, but no less resonant fashion, Armitage unfurls the bucolic history of her family and the land through a rather haphazardly assembled procession of convivial anecdotes from her youth. In a series of spontaneously navigated summer treks, she tracks alongside the long-dried-up Middle Alamosa creek bed to behold dramatic canyons, Native American petroglyphs, and majestic mesas, all interwoven with the often bittersweet snippets of her life growing up. Beholden to the dusty plateaus of her past and the sweeping natural beauty that remains, the author’s intent was to revisit and rediscover the bounty of the area and to share its nostalgic and environmental potential. Armitage’s language and her memories are poetically written, even when describing the prairies that have become tainted by human occupation and depleted and disfigured by “sheep, cattle, farming, strip mining, oil, gas exploration, feed lots, dairies, microwave and cell phone towers.” An engaging geographer and historian, Armitage takes the pulse of the sacred land spread out before her through luminous memories and photographs, all with an appreciative eye and a nod toward its untapped ecological splendor.
Both an intensely lyrical and intimate scrapbook of familial history and a uniquely sublime travelogue of the American Southwestern landscape.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8061-5162-5
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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