Intense, sensuous, lyrical, shaped by the sensibility of a poet and the eye of a farmer.
California farmer/memoirist Masumoto (Harvest Son, 1998, etc.) meanders through his fields and memories by way of the five senses.
As agriculture increasingly focuses on big business and the bottom line, Masumoto has become an eloquent voice for that increasingly rare breed, the family farmer. Working the land his parents worked before him, his life revolves around the production of Sun Crest peaches and writing evocative books about the process. Here, the author leads a tactile tour of the farm over time. Vivid passages introduce each of the book's five sections, as Masumoto recalls the smell of wet concrete, the taste of a stringy peach, and all the silences of the country he grew up in. As a member of a Japanese farming community, his experiences are both familiar and new: he recalls spring picnic menus that included sushi and bento boxes, the impact of racist land-ownership laws on his family, and his inability to communicate with his non-English-speaking grandmother during the many long hours they worked the fields side by side. Masumoto is particularly adept at conveying the junction at which tradition and modernity meet, describing the difficulties of choosing how to sticker his fruit and of following it to market, or portraying a visit by ten food editors from national magazines who “found it hard to slow their stride” while touring the farm and even harder to select their own peaches to be delivered overnight to their offices across the country. Most enchanting are his brief essays on family members. “Scent of My Father,” which reports on Dad's tendency to smell of cut grass, mud, and sweat, pays moving homage to the ties of earth and blood.
Intense, sensuous, lyrical, shaped by the sensibility of a poet and the eye of a farmer.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-01960-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
© 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.
