A finely drawn portrait of a fishery, once so revered its prey was stamped on Carthaginian and Phoenician coins, now hanging...
A handful of seasons among the Sicilian tonnaroti (tuna fishermen) are drawn with an appealing, lyric equanimity by newcomer Maggio.
On a chance visit to Sicily with her father, Maggio fell in love with a man and with an ancient ritual, the harvest of giant bluefin tuna as they make their way to springtime spawning grounds in the Mediterranean. The human relationship went the way of all flesh, but her fascination with the harvest of tuna grew stronger, to the point where she spent the whole season among the fishermen. She worked hard to draw the men out, to have them convey to her some reason for pursuing the doomed fishery (as over-fishing has pretty much reduced the catch to a piddling remnant). The men come to light as an engaging bunch of prideful artisans, elements in a near-mythic enterprise with the sea. The fishery was active at least 4000 years ago when local cave artists depicted bluefins on their walls: The prayers to Jesus offered by the fisherman feel alarmingly contemporary in so ageless a practice. More easily captured, and done so with Maggio's flair for description, are the physical aspects of he hunt—the setting and pulling of the nets and the architecture of the fish traps, the way to gaff a half-ton eight-foot bluefin and the way not to—the role of the fleet master, the biology of the prey, the atmosphere in the closed cannery with its ranks of copper cauldrons once fired by a hard bitter coal to cook the great fish. Added like chinks to a wall are details of her personal life on the island, the small dramas that come with friendships and a love affair.
A finely drawn portrait of a fishery, once so revered its prey was stamped on Carthaginian and Phoenician coins, now hanging by a thread. (30 b&w photographs)Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7382-0269-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Perseus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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