A peach of a book, and with a recipe for raisins in the bargain—worthy of placement alongside the best of Wendell Berry,...
A graceful meditation on the work of growing food and its meaning across generations.
Long before Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver turned to writing about food, Masumoto (Heirlooms: Letters from a Peach Farmer, 2007, etc.) was chronicling his work on an 80-acre farm of peaches, nectarines and grapes, as well as vineyards and gardens, in the Central Valley of California. For most of that time, he has used organic techniques. “Organic farming is not simple or easy, and the physical work breaks me,” he writes. “It’s easy to want to be environmentally responsible, but it’s a damned hard thing to achieve.” Farming has taken its toll on his father as well, whom he honors as a model and teacher (“Dad taught me the power of recognizing problems, analyzing them, and identifying new ways to go about things”)—to say nothing of a helping hand at many critical, even dangerous turns. To be a farmer and survive at it is, Masumoto reveals, to be many things: trend analyst and futures broker, repairman and mechanic, geologist and hydrologist. It is also to be a good neighbor, on which Masumoto affectionately recalls his Japanese-speaking grandfather visiting with Italian-speaking immigrant neighbors and somehow communicating enough to jointly concoct what the author calls “Muscat sake grappa.” Masumoto’s memoir demonstrates that there is no end to the work and the physical, and sometimes fiscal, punishment. Yet he closes, happily, with the prospect of his daughter becoming a farmer, too, working a tradition and a promise renewed “out of love,” even while surrounded by a culture that, he sharply notes, does not reward difference or recognize excellence.
A peach of a book, and with a recipe for raisins in the bargain—worthy of placement alongside the best of Wendell Berry, Liberty Hyde Bailey and other literary farmers.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9930-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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