At once pointless and moving, Hood’s narrative is too sketchy and diffuse to come into any sort of clear focus—which becomes...
Tearjerker novelist Hood (Ruby, 1998, etc.) sits down to flip through her family album in this sentimental account of her father’s battle with cancer.
“The day my father was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, I decided to go and find him a miracle.” Many Italian-Americans will see nothing ironic in the author’s tone, inhabiting as they do a world in which supernatural grace is seen to be only somewhat less accessible than fresh figs or decent ricotta cheese. Hood set out on her errand with a good deal of self-consciousness, however. For one thing, she is only half-Italian (her father was a Baptist from the Midwest). For another, she had put most of that old-time religion behind her when she grew up, went to college, became a writer, married a Protestant, and moved into the American mainstream. But all the old stories (of curses, evil eyes, healing potions, and miraculous statues) were still stowed away in the dimmer recess of her imagination, and in the twilight of her father’s illness they began to shine with an unfamiliar new light. So she set off on a series of pilgrimages—first to find a cure, and later (after her father died in spite of her efforts) to find an answer. Some of the places she describes (e.g., Mont-St. Michel, Chartres, Lourdes) will be familiar ground for most readers, but others (El Santuario de Chimayo, New Mexico) are a good deal more obscure, and some (like the Massachusetts town where a comatose girl has developed a large cult as a “victim soul”) are downright creepy. The final pilgrimage, to her mother’s ancestral village in Italy, seems an appropriate site to wrap up the action, but it doesn’t really succeed in imparting much shape to what is a basically formless, if diverting, tale.
At once pointless and moving, Hood’s narrative is too sketchy and diffuse to come into any sort of clear focus—which becomes an annoyance in the end, despite many fine vignettes.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-24259-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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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