An enthralling meditation on place.
A longing for home sends the author around the world.
In a memoir remarkable for its intimacy, wisdom, and radiant prose, Scottish singer/songwriter Tallack (Fair Isle: Through the Seasons, 2010), who was born in Shetland and lives in Glasgow, follows the 60th parallel, the border marking the harsh, remote northern regions from the more populous south. His purpose, though, is not to produce a travelogue about ruggedly exotic landscapes but to ask a philosophical question: “where am I?” From the age of 10, living in the Shetlands with his mother and brother after his parents divorced, he felt alienated and uprooted, which later intensified into “an unshakable feeling of exile and of homesickness” and an urge to find a place where he belonged. His father’s sudden death, when the author was 16, further fueled his restlessness and inspired his journey. Leaving Scotland, he headed west to Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Siberia, St. Petersburg, Finland, Sweden, and Norway before returning home. At each stop, his observations include not only a close examination of geology, geography, flora and fauna, but also history, myth, art, and literature. Tallack discovers a palimpsest of lives: he traces the arrival of Norsemen in Greenland at the end of the first millennium C.E., for example, where they encountered peoples “whom they called skraelings: wretches,” with whom they co-existed in “an uneasy balance.” The author offers a capsule history of opulent, besieged St. Petersburg, whose architecture, an amalgam of European styles, reflects the grand designs of various czars and czarinas. He also fell in love, unexpectedly, with Kamchatka, in desolate Siberia: “there was a stillness at its heart that seemed to calm, temporarily, the restlessness in my own.” He felt the same “deep centredness and settledness” in Fair Isle, an island off Scotland, and stayed for three years before loneliness impelled him back to Shetland. Throughout, Tallack renders descriptions of his emotional landscape as delicately as his painterly descriptions of the physical world.
An enthralling meditation on place.Pub Date: July 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68177-146-5
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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