A revelation—Wright finds the reflection of his own conflicted soul in the native state he loves and has hated.
One of the state’s most renowned writers takes readers deep into the heart of Texas.
As a staffer for the New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, Wright (The Terror Years: From Al-Qaeda to the Islamic State, 2016, etc.) has illuminated a variety of intriguing subcultures. His native Texas is as exotic as any of them. He approaches his subject on a number of levels: as a stereotype, a movie myth, a cultural melting pot, a borderland, a harbinger of what is to come in an increasingly polarized and conservative country, and as a crucible that has shaped the character of a young writer who couldn’t wait to escape but was drawn back. “Some maybe cowardly instinct whispered to me that if I accepted the offer to live elsewhere, I would be someone other than myself,” he writes. “My life might have been larger, but it would have been counterfeit. I would not be home.” The Austin-based author makes himself at home in these pages, traveling through Austin, Dallas, Houston, and El Paso and exploring the desolate wonders of Big Bend, “one of the least-visited national parks in the country, and also one of the most glorious,” and the West Texas wonders of Marfa, Lubbock, and Wink. The chapter on the levels of Texas culture, an updated version of a Texas Monthly piece from 1993, is particularly incisive. But the misadventures of the Texas legislature are what will strike most readers with an uneasy mixture of amazement, amusement, and disbelief; one law, notes the author, allows citizens to “openly carry swords, a welcome development for the samurai in our midst.” Once a Democratic bulwark (albeit conservatively so), the state has since become even more conservatively Republican, though a population that is not only growing, but growing younger and more diverse—the “Anglo” majority has become the minority—could make the state very much in play.
A revelation—Wright finds the reflection of his own conflicted soul in the native state he loves and has hated.Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52010-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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