A companion to Waterlog, this will hopefully bring Deakin to the attention of American readers, who will find him a kindred...
Part Walden, part Road to Oxiana: The late British natural-history writer Deakin (Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain, 1999) serves up an elegant meditation on trees and why they matter.
Put it down to the Druids and the Green Man, but folks back in the mother country love all things tree-related. They like toads, moles, sheep and suchlike critters, too, whence the deserved centrality of The Wind in the Willows, The Hobbit and the Pooh quartet, among other celebrations of country living. As Deakin puts it, they like these things perhaps precisely because they have lost so much of their rural heritage in recent decades, so that “the British generally take a correspondingly greater interest in what trees and woods they still have left.” Deakin, a literate chap, adds Gerald Manley Hopkins, Henry David Thoreau and Patrick Leigh Fermor to the mix, plus the Whole Earth Catalog, under whose influence he set about on an exercise in hippie communard living back in the day. But he was no latecomer. As he writes, he comes from a long, proud tradition of forest people, with fitting names in the family tree such as Wood and Greenwood, and forebears who belonged to the woodland-anarchist tradition of Robin Hood. To trust these pages, Deakin knows how to coppice and pollard; he writes lovingly of coops and sheds, moths and cornfields, oaks and apples. Not content to remain imprisoned in his lime-tree bower, Deakin departs midway through for a tour of other lands and other trees, venturing to East Anglia, France, Australia and Central Asia. Once the game is afoot, he writes with the studied breathlessness of David Attenborough (“We threaded our way off piste through more of the termite stalactites towards the ten-foot bushes, which, sure enough, were covered in ripe black fruit the size of small olives”) and communicates that he’s having the time of his life.
A companion to Waterlog, this will hopefully bring Deakin to the attention of American readers, who will find him a kindred spirit to Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry and other celebrants of the land.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9362-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
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
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