Next book

WHEN YOU SEE THE EMU IN THE SKY

MY JOURNEY OF SELF-DISCOVERY IN THE OUTBACK

Though cast against the brilliant red tones of the Australian outback, this slim volume tells a monotone tale of self-discovery. Fuller (Nima: A Sherpa in Connecticut, 1984, etc.) stalks the spiritual, but her language is too thin, and her discoveries are trite. When her off-Broadway play flops miserably and she finds herself tormented by the imminent death of a dear friend suffering from AIDS, she takes to the road with her teenage son in search of revelation in the Australian outback. Fuller rents a house that she soon fears is inhabited by a ghost. Good fortune and abiding spirits bring her to Max Eulo, a warm-hearted Aborigine who leads her into his world and the discovery of the Aboriginal ancestor whose spiritual home she now inhabits. He teaches her to put her ear to the ground and listen for messages from a more meaningful realm. She consults Ouija boards, tracks the calls of rare birds, indulges in deep-breathing exercises, and listens for the plaintive sound of the didgeridoo pipe. At last, a spirit doctor announces that ``the spiritual gateway has been lifted for her to enter.'' Along the way, Fuller rediscovers her profoundly midwestern upbringing, and the depth of her pain over the death of her first husband and her friend's battle with AIDS. She abandons the confines of her Connecticut home, frees her son from blue- bubble-gum and B-Ball madness, and watches for the sun rising in the outback. It is a long way to travel, and harder still to know how much she has learned because of the outback, Max Eulo, or simply the functions of distance and time. While the itinerant melody of the didgeridoo haunts this tale, one can never hear it quite clearly enough to call it genuinely original. (Author tour)

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-688-14895-6

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 59


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2016


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist

Next book

WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 59


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2016


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist

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

Close Quickview