A rather run-of-the mill travelogue, despite the author’s lofty ambitions.
Novelist and nonfiction writer O’Grady (On Golf: The Game, the Players, and a Personal History of Obsession, 2005, etc.) chronicles his road trip across America.
Born in the United States, the author lived there until 1973, when he moved to Europe in his early 20s. He’d only been back stateside a few times, and then only briefly. Now in his 50s, he felt the need to reconnect with America via a road trip from New York to San Francisco through the north and back through the south. He clearly views the trip as a romantic, Kerouac-style quest: “The American road is a great seduction,” he writes early on. Traveling through cities and towns across the country, he interacted with friends, family and many strangers—most unknown, but some famous, such as the writer Edmund White in New York and the activist Tom Hayden in California. O’Grady gives historical sketches along the way, though often with a vague, hearsay quality, and peppered with quotes from more insightful writers. The author also dabbles in political discussion (predictably, the George W. Bush administration is a common and frankly easy target), and he hops haphazardly from topic to topic: NAFTA, the meatpacking industry, blues music, Walt Whitman—whatever peculiarly American subject strikes his fancy at the moment. However, the author has a gift for getting strangers to open up, and he recalls interesting conversations with a wide variety of people, including an Indian motel owner, a group of rappers and an Alabama Klansman. Ultimately, O’Grady fails to delve deeply into his subjects, and the narrative becomes less a comprehensive portrait of the real America than a scattershot collection of accumulated details.
A rather run-of-the mill travelogue, despite the author’s lofty ambitions.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-09-946953-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Vintage UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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