Like Cave’s growling music, this book isn’t for everyone, but who doesn’t like the specter of “a gloop of ectoplasm spurting...
The gloomy Aussie rock star ponders the ways of the road in this blend of prose and poetry.
The sick bag: until the airlines decide to trim the cost, every seatback contains one. Constantly airborne but not prone to motion sickness, Cave (The Death of Bunny Munro, 2009) chose to use the device as an impromptu notebook to record a tour of 2014. “You must take the first step alone,” his guardian angel intoned as, packed into a van brought to a crawl on the highway by a decapitated accident victim, he tried to get some sleep. A few cities later, the author had a theme: a man at a German restaurant in Milwaukee served him “a pretzel big as a severed human head.” It’s not the most appetizing vision, but Cave’s sick bag becomes a medicine bundle of a kind, a storeroom of such images, to say nothing of books by Patti Smith and songs by Elvis Presley and company. The author hovers above the Platonic domains of beauty and ugliness, the former perhaps best represented by Roxy Music frontman Bryan Ferry, who waves his manicured hand across an idyllic English landscape and confesses to not having written a song in years, saying, “there is nothing to write about.” A devotee of grimmer venues, Cave surveys the loveliness of a Canadian river (“pleasant,” “faultless,” and “fabulous” are three of the glowing adjectives that come in quick succession) and then rushes back to the hotel to write a poem that begins, “I was born in a puddle of blood wanting everything.” Well, at least the head remains on the body. Along the way, Cave channels Allen Ginsberg (“Hop in my sick bag! All you wild Texas girls!”), casts a sideways look or two at rock-star fame and the music business, and generally amuses himself with bouquets of words.
Like Cave’s growling music, this book isn’t for everyone, but who doesn’t like the specter of “a gloop of ectoplasm spurting through the orange air”?Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-81465-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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
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