A provocative, moving mélange of personal confession and intellectual inquiry—another sui generis work from one of our most...
Solnit (A Paradise Built in Hell, 2010, etc.) considers the nature and purposes of storytelling in a series of elegantly nested meditations.
The author begins with 100 pounds of apricots, picked from a tree outside the home her Alzheimer’s-stricken mother can no longer safely inhabit. Canning this abundance of perishable fruit to preserve it, Solnit begins to think about the ways in which the stories we tell arrest time; her musings on decay and death gain greater urgency when she learns that she has a potentially cancerous condition that requires surgery. In “Mirrors,” she recalls that telling stories was a vehicle for her mother’s deeply conflicted views about the past; their relationship was fraught, and Solnit escaped from constant criticisms and resentments into the solace of books. Yet “books are solitudes in which we meet,” she insists, repeatedly using the word “empathy” to characterize the essential quality needed to create stories that express our common humanity. Solnit co-opts Georgia O’Keeffe’s wonderfully evocative phrase “the faraway nearby” to specify the delicate balance between distance and closeness that enables this process of reaching out through storytelling. She employs a series of chapter titles that serve as both metaphors and precise physical descriptions—“Ice,” “Flight,” “Breath” and “Wound”—to propel her narrative into the central “Knot.” In it, she is operated on, “then sewn shut with thread and knots,” prompting her to expatiate on Greek mythology’s ancient image of human life as a thread winding through a labyrinth. “Unwound” begins the process of re-using previous chapter titles to give them new meanings as Solnit recuperates in Iceland, and the text moves toward a final consideration of those apricots as “a catalyst that made the chaos of that era come together as a story of sorts.”
A provocative, moving mélange of personal confession and intellectual inquiry—another sui generis work from one of our most stimulating essayists.Pub Date: June 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-670-02596-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
SEEN & HEARD
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
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
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