Packed with fascinating information, lively writing, and a certain pleasant nostalgia, this book is a good candidate for...
Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter Branch (Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard, 2014) immerses himself in a huge Utah family to understand contemporary cattle rearing, rodeo riding, and the endangered environment of the American West, which is owned primarily by the American government but leased to private ranchers.
The Wright family goes back more than 150 years in rural Utah; their initial settlers were part of the Mormon migration in the 1850s. “Americans weren’t always known for their roots,” writes the author, “but the Wrights had them planted in the red soil of Smith Mesa before the transcontinental railroad was connected up north, decades before Utah was an official state.” Bill and Evelyn have raised 13 children in Smith Mesa. These children, plus an ever growing brood of grandchildren, populate the narrative, which is focused mostly on the men due to the rodeo thread. Branch tells the saga in mostly chronological fashion based on his time with the family, with historical flashbacks and occasional flash-forwards mixed in. The rodeo thread focuses on the sons (and a few of their sons), most of whom have succeeded at the highest levels in their sport. Participating in rodeos provides them with both monetary rewards and a sense of competitive pride, not to mention plenty of broken bones and head injuries. The cattle-rearing thread focuses primarily on patriarch Bill; his children and grandchildren pitch in at times, but caring for the herd is his passion. As the story progresses, the grazing land begins to wear out, federal regulators keep watch, corporate cattle operations swallow the industry, and tourism encroaches. All the while, Bill wonders how many more years his business will remain viable.
Packed with fascinating information, lively writing, and a certain pleasant nostalgia, this book is a good candidate for reading one chapter per day; eventually, the narrative becomes unwieldy—too many family members to track easily, too many long drives to rodeo after rodeo, and too many abrupt narrative shifts from cattle to rodeo to environmental degradation.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-29234-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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
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