Like sheep themselves, the author’s account often wanders outside the confines of the pasture and into the readers’ hearts.
What is the common thread between road rage, Elvis and socks?
The answer: wool, writes Friend (The Compassionate Carnivore, 2009, etc.) in this memoir about raising sheep with her partner. The story begins with an anecdote about a man who, during a visit to the author’s farm to purchase beef, became riveted by a sign that read, “Warning Electric Fence.” It's the perfect extended metaphor for Friend’s adventures on the farm—that caution often gives way to curiosity, demonstrated soon after as the man reached out and was shocked. Like her customer, the author has been intrigued by adventures into unknown territory. In her latest installment of life on the farm, the author focuses on the middles, the times not often celebrated, ruminating on being both mid-career and middle-aged. The author's humility is engaging, and she is well aware that sheep farming isn't the broadest of interests: “If people are relying on me to show them the way, they’re in big trouble…basically because I’ve begun turning to memoirs myself in search of direction and encouragement.” But she's quite wise, as well, offering several insights into what humans can learn from sheep. Friend ably weaves together comical stories, strands of self-help, historical and environmental facts.
Like sheep themselves, the author’s account often wanders outside the confines of the pasture and into the readers’ hearts.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-306-81844-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
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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