Refreshing, finely turned gems of wit and wisdom from an author who has asked his family to bury him with a “decent library.”
A collection of literary tapas.
Novelist and short story writer Orner (Creative Writing/San Francisco State Univ.; Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge, 2013, etc.) combines short, reflective essays about literature with personal memories. The pieces (some previously published) are literary hybrids, and the book becomes a series of “unlearned meditations that stumbles into memoir.” The big names (Kafka, Chekhov, Melville, Cheever, Bellow, etc.) are well-represented, but so too are those outside of the canon—e.g., Lyonel Trouillot, Álvaro Mutis, Bohumil Hrabal and his “lightning strike of a novel,” Too Loud a Solitude. In the first piece, ostensibly about how Orner likes to read, reflect, look around, and just listen at San Francisco’s General Hospital’s cafeteria, the author transitions to Chekhov’s “tender and sorrowful” story “The Bishop,” which he admires for how the author (a doctor) lovingly employs details. He ends thinking about his dead grandmother. In a cabin in Bolinas, California, Orner thinks about his dead father and reads Breece D’J Pancake’s story “First Day of Winter,” which “gets [him] every time. The way a story about characters, nonexistent people, pushes us back to our own.” Orner confesses that John Edgar Wideman’s story “Welcome” is the “saddest story” he has ever read “by a wide margin.” Again, thinking about his father, he asks, what is the best Father’s Day novel? “Hands down The Brothers Karamazov.” But Bernard Malamud’s “My Son the Murderer” is the best story. While it takes Dostoevsky 700 pages “to get to the bottom of fathers and sons,” Malamud “can name that tune in under 8.” At 22, he accidentally fell out of a canoe but saved the book he was reading—the indelible and “generous” To the Lighthouse—and then anxiously waited for it to dry in the sun so he could finish it. Book lovers will devour these genuine, personal tales about literature and reading.
Refreshing, finely turned gems of wit and wisdom from an author who has asked his family to bury him with a “decent library.”Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-936787-25-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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
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