Reading this quiet book should provide the sort of balm for those in similar circumstances that writing it must have for the...
A Midwestern writer finds what comfort she can in food and family as her mother suffers through chemotherapy.
How do you hold it together when things are falling apart? As Babine (Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life, 2015) suggests in these short, often impressionistic chapters, through the familiar, through ritual, and through tradition. The author addresses cooking, the weather, and the state of modern medicine, among numerous other topics, but always with the thematic undercurrent of her mother’s health and mortality in general. Her mother had suffered through a cancer that typically occurs in children, and though her doctors considered her cancer-free, they strongly recommended chemotherapy to keep her that way. “We are reminded, many times,” writes the author, “that if she does not do chemo, there is a 70 percent chance of recurrence and a 40 percent chance of survival; with chemotherapy, she has a 90 percent chance of survival if it returns.” So her mother submitted to chemo, and life went on. The author also chronicles her sister’s pregnancy, the death of a friend’s spouse from cancer, and her father’s sickness. Through everything, Babine cooked, sometimes for her mother and for others in her family, always to have some sense of order and control, a recipe with ingredients and instructions, in a world gone haywire. It’s clear that for the author, food sustains like a lifeline or even a bloodline; there are traditions among the Swedish in Minnesota, wisdom passed down through generations. Babine found Le Creuset cookery in secondhand stores that she never could have afforded new, and she gave each of her new pots and pans a name. She also discovered “the kind of pastry I want to build my life with.” She continues to navigate her way through extraordinary challenges with ordinary comforts, finding poetry in the everyday.
Reading this quiet book should provide the sort of balm for those in similar circumstances that writing it must have for the author.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-57131-372-0
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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