Today’s noisy media environment often consists of rigid, uninformed viewpoints passed off as the sole truth. Cerulli...
Pondering his stance on hunting and eating meat, a committed vegan delivers an entertaining and erudite meditation on his place in the natural world.
Though Cerulli’s boyhood included fishing and exploring the outdoors, during high school he became a vegetarian; at 20 he was a staunch vegan. During his 30s, with his health deteriorating from lack of protein, he was forced to alter his diet. He began fishing again, but his attempts did little to stock his larder. So Cerulli contemplated what had once seemed unimaginable: “What about hunting? The thought came quietly, furtively, like an unwelcome stranger.” Along with his study of historical, philosophical, religious, conservation and environmental texts, the author’s excursions provide the focus for the narrative. He examines the politics of food and the contentious debates that have ambushed America’s conversation about the food supply. He also skillfully delves into the importance of habitat health for wildlife, the Lacey Act of 1900 and Theodore Roosevelt’s role in the conservation movement. Cerulli ventured back into the woods, rekindling personal relationships along the way. While he traces the evolution of hunting as a sport for elites to a pursuit for the common man, he examines his own mindset slowly changing from “militant vegan” to deer hunter. Cerulli assumes the role of the reasonable yet probing narrator, raising questions and pointing out the contradictions and truths contained within the multiple viewpoints he discusses. The refreshingly evenhanded tone allows readers to judge the author’s argument on the merits of his literary and personal evidence.
Today’s noisy media environment often consists of rigid, uninformed viewpoints passed off as the sole truth. Cerulli provides a welcome antidote to the bluster.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60598-277-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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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