by Tim Kreider ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2018
An artful example of how the deeply personal can also be the broadly general.
A noted cartoonist and essayist returns with another collection of profoundly personal essays.
A number of themes and motifs glide through the gleaming streams of Kreider’s (We Learn Nothing, 2012, etc.) writing. He writes continually about his relationships with women, all of which have broken (though some amiably so), and he notes that he has never been married or even lived with a woman. We also hear about the cat he’s had for nearly 20 years; the author wryly notes that this relationship has lasted the longest of his adult life. Throughout, Kreider, the creator of the popular comic strip “The Pain—When Will It End?” deploys an extremely self-deprecating tone, which comes across as appealing and humorous and, sometimes, laugh-out-loud funny. He identifies himself as an atheist, but he also says that belief is “softening” now. He also writes affectingly about time, observing that the past is really just a story we continually revise. Though most of the pieces—previously published in other forms—are brief, there are a couple of longer ones, including one about “attachment theory,” a topic that increased in interest for him when he learned that as an infant he’d been involved in a key psychological study on the topic. His liberal political views are evident, particularly so in “Our War on Terror,” an essay that gently interweaves his observations about current events with an account of another imploding relationship with a woman. Literary and cultural allusions pop up throughout the collection: Albee, Gilgamesh, Maslow, Freud, Montaigne, Descartes, and others. Kreider can also be informal/nontraditional in his language, and the pieces are piercingly, painfully reflective: for example, he discusses his college teaching experiences and how he dealt with his sexual attractions to his students.
An artful example of how the deeply personal can also be the broadly general.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3899-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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Pulitzer Prize Finalist
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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