A quirkily entertaining exploration of what it means to be human and what it might be like to be a goat.
What would it be like to be a goat?
Thwaites (The Toaster Project, 2011) explains that his goal was to achieve a “profound shift in perspective” so that he might “look at a chair and [not] automatically associate it with sitting…[and ultimately be able to] look at a(nother) goat and think of it as another person like me.” A 30-something freelance designer still living with his father, the author was at loose ends, still basking in the success of his earlier project building a toaster from scratch. Rather than worrying about his future, he tells us, he decided to explore taking “a holiday from being human” by seeing if he could be accepted by a herd of goats. To achieve this, he designed a goatlike exoskeleton that included prosthetic limbs that prevented him from using his hands. The necessity of checking out his environment without using his hands was one of the more interesting aspects of his major change of perspective. He also committed himself to eating grass, albeit cooked in a pressure cooker over a campfire. Thwaites visited a goat sanctuary in the U.K., where he was able to closely observe their behavior. After practicing on his prosthetic limbs, he felt ready for the last leg of his journey. Walking with his prosthetic limbs was, of course, difficult, but the author notes that adopting a four-legged gait was not an insurmountable challenge. At last, he took the final step; hosted by a Swiss farmer, he joined his herd of goats. They seemed to accept his presence as they grazed on a steep alpine trail, although at one point, they became agitated when he inadvertently challenged their hierarchy. Dozens of photos document his journey from man to goat.
A quirkily entertaining exploration of what it means to be human and what it might be like to be a goat.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61689-405-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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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