Well written and passionate, though frequently frustrating.
A literary journey through memory to childhood in 1950s Hawaii.
For novelist Moore (One Last Look, 2003, etc.), the sea is a wild, ever-present reality: “It was always there, and I was always in it.” In this mix of memoir and anthology—a stilted, irritating format—the author discusses her distant home, “a ravishing little world…an isolated place, redolent with romance.” Like many writers, Moore read voraciously as a child, borrowing books from the Adults Only shelves at the local library. In 1954, she recalls, Robinson Crusoe inspired her at age eight to build “a lean-to made of palm fronds, stocked with old ropes, carefully-rendered maps of hidden treasure and hemp bags of dried fruit and stale bread.” Robinson Crusoe led her to Treasure Island, which led her to Typhoon. She began to keep a notebook of copied passages from the books she read, most highlighting the literature of the sea. This book is, presumably, a showcase of these discoveries; Moore includes short snippets from (among others) Hesiod, Keats, Thoreau, Woolf, Dickinson and Chekhov, along with, most interestingly, a passage from Isabella Bird’s Six Months in the Sandwich Islands and a tale from “His Hawaiian Majesty King Kalakaua.” The highlights of this short tome are the author’s far-too-infrequent sprints back into her youth. She describes roaming freely through wild country without fences or boundaries, picking guavas, lichees and Surinam cherries when she was hungry, digging up rare ferns for replanting indoors. She had a pet spider; she went everywhere barefoot. She slid down flumes that irrigated the pineapple fields, a forbidden pastime, and after a rainfall used giant ti leaves to sled down the ancient Hawaiian he’e holua slides. Moore grew up in a Hawaiian paradise where ethereal myth and corporeal pursuits commingled. Her book is most delightful when she draws on her memories, disappointing when she quotes disruptively and at length from her favorite texts.
Well written and passionate, though frequently frustrating.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1862-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
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