Willowy and beguiling.
A sudden, loss-tinged memoir of upstate New York’s Finger Lakes region, from classicist and linguist Morrow (The Names of Things, 1997).
“Seeing something ordinary as…numinous,” a late friend once advised the author, would be special, like falling in love: “The intensity of that focus, that concentration of energy, would be the heating up in which some significant transformation could take place.” That convergence is what Morrow brings to these short essays, which depict not just the Finger Lakes, but also “the solace of the eternal presence of nature.” She glories in a pinkish gold slope of trees, perhaps wild apples, or the glory of a redbud, “blossomed purple in a ghostly film over long slender branches of silver.” She will often find herself going back: to the doings of the old native populations; to that special place between informed observation and instinct that a trapper had unveiled to her; to her brother; to the simplicity of a summer camp in Canada, with its “golden light of kerosene lamps, walls of thin blond wood, tarpaper tacked over the table . . . the rich outlying darkness.” Two subjects call to the author time and again. She’s compelled by the Finger Lakes’ “strangle dense history . . . so many powerful phenomena arising in what would otherwise have seemed a backwater,” the odd metaphysics of a region that brought us women’s rights, abolitionism, and the scientific advancement of agriculture, not to mention turkeys walking through the melting snow, woodcocks whirling from the ground like leaves stirred by the wind, and a landscape so venerably beautiful it makes your teeth ache. The other topic that fascinates Morrow is beekeeping. “One year,” she notes, “we found raspberry that was crystal in the comb, and once a dense wild plum that was so strong it was almost intoxicating.” Her hanging of impressionistic paintings offers evocative glimpses of place, supplemented by romantic portraits of people who guided her in the art of seeing those places.
Willowy and beguiling.Pub Date: July 22, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-09856-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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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