Fine-grained, honest rural sketches, on a par with Noel Perrin and Don Mitchell.
The delight-filled education of an out-of-the-blue shepherdess.
Not that there weren't travails for Jorrín, who chronicled her ups and downs as a newly minted farmer in a weekly column for the Delaware (N.Y.) County Times, from which these short, quiet, yet quick-footed vignettes were drawn. Her decision to raise sheep on her upstate New York spread, which included a rambling house and assorted outbuildings in the foothills of the Catskills, was instigated by a neighbor, who agreed to be her partner but soon bolted—much like the sheep whenever Jorrín tried to approach them. She stuck it out, slowly learning the ropes, living a hand-to-mouth existence, coming to appreciate both the glory of the place (“June grass, quite uniform and consistent, pale green at first, changing as the summer wore on to an airy delicate shade of rose, exquisite in the evening light”) and the all-or-nothingness of the farming life: “Today is a day off for me, of sorts, one of the three I've had this year.” In a voice that at times possesses a biblical quality (“They shall teach you what you need to know to take care of them, I was told”), Jorrín might recite some apropos Chinese poetry (“Come on a whim and gone down the mountain, the whim vanished can anyone know who I was?”) or calmly recount the day “the haymow of my barn collapsed. . . . A beam broke and 1,650 bales of hay crashed down on my sheep.” She can make warm sentimentality feel good instead of gooey, much in the same surprising fashion she can keep a straight face when she admits to receiving a state grant to learn how to train a donkey. The author never lays anything on for effect; not for a second does the reader doubt that “the most beautiful place in the world to be at night is in the barn.”
Fine-grained, honest rural sketches, on a par with Noel Perrin and Don Mitchell.Pub Date: June 7, 2007
ISBN: 1-58234-401-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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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