Dry, intelligent recollections of a fly-fishing life, from Raymond (Steelhead Country, not reviewed, etc.). Raymond has cobbled together 16 essays, grouped under four categories: fishing acquaintances, venues (the Miramichi, Christmas Island, the River Dee, and others), items (flies, cane rods, and an odd-man-out piece on reviewing fishing books), and a mostly humorous miscellany. For Raymond, who has been editing and writing fishing material almost as long as he has been fishing (though he makes his living as a newspaperman), this is not a greatest hits collection—there are winners and losers in each section. Rather, the essays are bound together by their honesty and practicality and in their desire to convey the boundless, multihued fascinations of a day astream, even when it features kidney stone torment, rattlesnakes, poison ivy, and dog feces all in an afternoon. As with any fishing book that isn’t afraid to float a position, readers will find much to quibble with: which writers on fly fishing are worth reading (he suspiciously neglects Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, Bill Barich, and Datus Proper, perhaps because Raymond is a bit prim), the claim that class status isn’t a consideration when choosing a fishing buddy, or the inconceivable statement that he liked the movie A River Runs Through It better than Norman Maclean’s book. There are times when his prose comes empurpled——each wave driven by the pulsing energy of the world’s great hidden heart——but not enough to be mortifying. There are other times when the writing feels like a plug for a lodge: “The 12 guest rooms had been outfitted with air-conditioning units and new queen-sized beds.” But for the most part, these are good fishing stories: glorious locales, smartly observed; a wealth of arcana and history and self-deprecating humor. And it doesn’t hurt that he can turn a decent phrase.
Pub Date: July 17, 1998
ISBN: 1-55821-700-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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
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
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