Offutt follows up his collection of agrarian short stories (Kentucky Straight, 1992—not reviewed) with a picaresque tale of a decade on the road. The author is the protagonist in this engaging and irreverent story, much of which may even be factual. But even if some of the details may not be literally true, as a cynical reader might suspect, the book is sometimes truly literate. Offutt, almost as enamored with Figures of Speech as he is with Mother Nature, devises some similes (``a city as cold as crowbar''; ``predictable as diarrhea'') that are more adroit than others (``The sky was a gray flannel blanket like a water color background with too much paint''). The author sprang from the foothills of Appalachia (where the terrain is ``humped like a kicked rug'') before he turned 20. Before he was 30, not so long ago, he passed through New York and Minnesota, California and the Everglades, the plains, mountains, and swamps of America. Drifting his way past redoubts of poverty and outposts of counterculture, Offutt sought his fortune, perhaps as an actor, perchance as a playwright or maybe as a poet. What he found, besides sex, was occasional work as a dishwasher, a mosquito-plagued naturalist, and a faux walrus in a surreal, flea- bitten circus. (A job promotion's upward mobility: He was allowed to sleep under the truck.) The effect is Candide following the path of Orwell down and out in Paris and London. Threaded throughout is the moving journal of Offutt's wife's pregnancy and the birth of the Offutt scion. Finally, Offutt tends his own garden beside a river in America's heartland as he offers an acute reconstruction of things that may have passed. As the old adage has it, you can't step into the same river twice. Even so, a dip into this stream of self-consciousness is an entertaining pastime.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-78734-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
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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