Baker evokes strange worlds and distant times in a narrative that never fails to flow and that, in the end, is admirably...
An enlightening study of the Beat Generation’s quest for enlightenment in India.
The most prominent exemplar of the holy-fool searcher was not Jack Kerouac, who proclaimed himself a bodhisattva, or even Gary Snyder, who turned to Japan for guidance, but instead the ecstatic sensualist Allen Ginsberg. Baker (In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, 1993, etc.), a fine storyteller, traces the moment to a New York day on which Ginsberg, gazing out the window of some anonymous apartment, sees God, or at least a god. From that moment on, though famously still interested in more earthly adventures with young men, he sought the presence of the divine. No better place for that quest than India, which, in the early 1960s, was not wholly prepared for Ginsberg’s arrival, nor the attentions of more reluctant beats such as Gregory Corso. Yet Ginsberg soon found sympathetic allies among religious but mostly nonsectarian Indians, who shared some of the American poet’s worldly interests and brought a beat sensibility to their own culture, which was thriving, especially around Bombay and Calcutta. Blessed with the ability to mix and make friends and with a Zelig-like talent for being in the right place at the right time, Ginsberg antedated the Beatles in Rishikesh by a few years. Though in love with much of what he saw—he chided Paul Bowles for having warned him away from cheap lodgings, writing, “I must say, you made it sound as if a westerner would die of rat poison if he stayed anywhere but Taj Mahal Hotel”—he was also a realist enough to see India’s suffering as well. This knowledge came to fill notebooks, and Ginsberg imported many things Indian, notably the Hare Krishna chant, to the Bay Area and Greenwich Village.
Baker evokes strange worlds and distant times in a narrative that never fails to flow and that, in the end, is admirably illuminating.Pub Date: April 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-158-5
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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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