A delectable feast of the heart.
A professor and journalist’s engaging account of how being an urban forager in New York City led her to unexpected personal enlightenment.
As a child growing up in 1970s Queens, New York Times “Wild Edibles” columnist Chin (Creative Nonfiction/CUNY; Split: Stories from a Generation Raised on Divorce, 2002) loved nothing better than to root around in the soil near her single mother’s apartment or savor the delicious foods her Chinese-born grandfather prepared in his kitchen. Yet the “lessons on life” she learned came from neither her mother nor her grandfather. Instead, they came from a feisty, loving grandmother who helped Chin weather painful emotional storms that resulted from rocky parental and romantic relationships. By the time Chin reached her late 30s, she turned her early love of digging in the dirt into a serious interest in urban foraging. The deeper she ventured into her interests, however, the more her grandmother’s health, and the author’s personal life, began to decline. Faced with the loss of the woman who had taken “the place of mother in [her] heart” and the possibility of permanent singledom, Chin began reflecting on her life and the people in it. She and her often self-absorbed mother “acted as if…there was never enough time or love or money to go around to sustain us.” Yet the natural world was a place of abundance where all things were possible, and while life was a series of stages that eventually culminated in death, to appreciate it meant seeing all things as attempts to cope with the at-times hostile “wilderness of the city.” As she hunted the urban wilds of NYC for motherwort, mulberries and mushrooms, Chin not only cultivated acceptance, but also discovered an even more tantalizing prize: love. Interspersed throughout with delicious urban forager recipes, Chin’s book delights as it informs and inspires.
A delectable feast of the heart.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5619-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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