Backing her on-the-ground account with asides on communal movements, idealistic failures, and our deeply flawed culture,...
An absorbing, sometimes strange profile of the last of the back-to-the-landers, if not the last “real” man.
In this rare instance of a magazine-article-turned-book that works, novelist Gilbert (Stern Men, 2000) expands a GQ feature on latter-day mountain man Eustace Conway to address a range of cultural-historical topics, blending bookishness with roll-in-the-dirt intrepidity. To be sure, Conway is a strange bird: a teenaged runaway from the home of a perfectionist, uncommunicative father and apparently repressed mother who spent 17 years living in a tepee, eating squirrel soup, and fending for himself in the wilderness, he’s the living embodiment of Robert Bly’s Iron John ideal—except he’s the real thing, and not just another urban wannabe. A bundle of contradictions, Conway has renounced most aspects of American consumerism while amassing a backwoods empire of more than a thousand acres in the North Carolina mountains that he calls Turtle Island, a fleet of battered trucks, and a small army of followers, nine out of ten of whom do not long endure his weird boot-camp regime. Conway’s “coolest adventure,” one that gained him national media coverage, was a cross-country trip on horseback that took him to Indian reservations, black and Chicano ghettoes, and well-groomed suburbs alike. The author is no latecomer to Conway’s story; she first got to know about him more than a decade ago, when she cowboyed with his brother in Wyoming. She excels at capturing Conway’s inflexibility and inability to keep friends, his “man of destiny” monomania, and his superbly honed, altogether rare skills. Though Gilbert clearly admires Conway, she writes of him with complexity and nuance: “It can be mortifying to learn that life at Turtle Island is grueling and that Eustace is another flawed human being, with his own teeming brew of unanswered questions.”
Backing her on-the-ground account with asides on communal movements, idealistic failures, and our deeply flawed culture, Gilbert delivers a first-rate work of reportage.Pub Date: May 20, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03086-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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
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
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