A collection of personal anecdotes, case histories, and reflections notable for their Zen-like quality of absolute acceptance. Remen (Univ. of Calif., San Francisco, Medical School; The Human Patient, 1980) was once a pediatrician and is now a ``psycho-oncologist,'' counseling people with cancer. Her success in that field probably lies in her skills as a listener and her conviction that the stories friends, relatives, and patients tell about their lives are ``the way wisdom gets passed along.'' When she was a child, those stories were (and still are) often told around kitchen tables, hence the title. The stories that she retells here are drawn from her own life as a medical student and a practicing physician, and from the lives and dreams of her patients. Organized into chapters that celebrate spiritual and emotional breakthroughs, the tales are funny, moving, enlightening, and often based on seemingly inconsequential moments. For instance, Remen uses the sight of blades of grass growing through a concrete sidewalk to demonstrate that, despite natural disaster and human clumsiness, ``life is not fragile.'' Other lessons are taught by a young gang member, an air traffic controller, and the people of Fiji, as well as by Remen's grandfather. She also borrows insights from Zen teachings and from Buddhism, matching them with anecdotes from her own childhood; one of the ideas that emerges from this blend is that life is like a jigsaw puzzle, with lessons to be learned from each dark and light fragment. The simplicity and immediacy of the insights take the curse off an inclination to New Age speak. Part of Remen's work is to help sick people die, but this modest volume, very like a series of meditations, will inspire healthy lives as well. (First serial to Ladies Home Journal, Family Circle, and New Age Journal; Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection)
Pub Date: Aug. 6, 1996
ISBN: 1-57322-042-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
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 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
