These pieces glow like a well-tended smudge fire, fending off the banality of what has come to pass as fishing stories—the pompous pretensions of the competitive jet-set angler—from Wetherell (North of Now, 1997, etc.). Wetherell is not a prolific writer on fly-fishing, though he is one of the best. He is the kind of guy who stops and smells the coffee while astream: Intuition tells him that knowing “something of the landscape, terrain, history, and culture of the region through which your river flows” is infinitely more important than casting talent. It is elusive, that feel for a place, but attentiveness to it is the only game in town for Wetherell. Some of the best accounts in this book are the tours on which he takes readers to various locales, setting the rivers in their context as he tries to learn the quirks and portents of the water. He shares the joys of discovering a river new to him, the upper Connecticut, where the wild trout announce that “life can be ironic and bitter and cruel, and it is only moments and places like these that redeem it.” He takes trips to Maine fishing camps, forgotten outposts now vulnerable as their very rareness and isolation act as enticements. He also visits Vermont fishing clubs that seek to maintain a level of authenticity. Wetherell is enjoyable as the curmudgeon (fuming when he finds a parvenu fishing one of his secret holes—the freebooter is talking on a cell phone too—he wants to “slink back to the 1940s where I belong”), whether complaining about the commercialization of the sport, ripping into “the contemporary fascist style in sportswear,” or detailing the importance of secrecy when it comes to giving out tips. Wetherell doesn’t claim an ability to untie every knot a river throws his way, and there are many. It is a humility that becomes him.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55821-698-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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