There are many treasures to discover in this insightful memoir of hiking and healing in the Himalayas.
With a naturalist’s eye and a poet’s pen, a victim of violence looks to the Himalayas for healing.
When Alter (Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief: Inside the World of Indian Moviemaking, 2007, etc.) and his wife, Ameeta, were viciously attacked in their home in the Himalayan foothills in 2008, the prolific writer didn’t know if he would ever put pen to page again. He wasn’t even sure he would be able to walk. With clarity and lyricism, Alter tells how he managed to do both. He also convincingly brings to life the culture, terrain, flora and fauna of the Himalayas. This is not a navel-gazing memoir in which the answers to life’s questions are resolved on a long, meditative walk. Instead, Alter offers a multifaceted consideration of life’s tough truths and stunning splendors. The author aptly describes his approach as “taking dashan” on India’s Bandarpunch and Nanda Devi and Tibet’s Mount Kailash as he travels in the presence of these earthly teachers, observing and absorbing their lessons. Although Alter is by nature a solitary seeker, one senses that he is accompanied not only by the porters he must employ, but also by the diverse group of writers he quotes, ranging from Tenzing Norgay’s take on yeti folklore to Thoreau’s meditation on the virtues of walking. Alter’s own writing is subtle and specific, conveying his shifting perceptions in a way that no sweeping generalizations ever could. A self-professed atheist, the author’s writing is nonetheless deeply spiritual, as when he writes about the prayer flags he would design to hang from the Himalayan hemlocks: “a deconstructed rainbow, cross-referenced by the breeze.” The combination of realism and mysticism makes this a rich, satisfying memoir that plumbs the depths—and acknowledges the limits—of both man and mountain.
There are many treasures to discover in this insightful memoir of hiking and healing in the Himalayas.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62872-510-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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 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
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