Lory

Kalanithi‘s story makes it clear both why medicine becomes dehumanized (it's hard to remain open in the face of suffering) and how powerful it can be when doctors retain a sense of the sacred mystery of their calling and the reality of the human core that is not only body or mechanism. This book is a record of a brave man's life and its writing an act of courage itself, the reading of which can help us face our lives more bravely too. Science and spirit are not opposites, but in their true nature belong together. It's the battle to bring them into harmony that is our true challenge today, and this book an eloquent example of that fight.

See my full review on The Emerald City Book Review.This is a very strange book. It is funny, sometimes hilariously so, but it's also disorienting and savage and mystifying. The premise is, to say the least, odd: a megalomaniac matriarch, along with various descendants and hangers-on, have gathered in her walled estate to await the end of the world, of which they expect to be the only survivors. Given that most of the characters detest most of the others, the mind boggles at what will happen when their already-insular social circle is made even smaller. Classic country-house scenes of deliciously venomous dialogue are interspersed with visions and mysterious occurrences that give the whole book the quality of a nightmare from which it is singularly difficult to wake. I kept wondering what it would be like on stage or in a film, though sadly, I don't think this has a chance of coming to pass.

Wow. Devastating and so important. This is not just a relational trauma memoir but a record of a spiritual battle, a fight for the grounds of reality itself. A fight in which we will all, at some point, have to make our own stand.

Let me never, never, never try to hold someone hostage to my own world view. That is the genesis of evil.

“I could have my mother's love, but there were terms, the same terms they had offered me three years before: that I trade my reality for theirs, that I take my own understanding and bury it, leave it to rot in the earth.” Ch 39

THIS is what the struggle of the “end times” is about, not owning stupid hoards of food and gasoline and guns, but the ability to own your own thoughts, your own understanding, and through them to connect freely with others, not walled off in fearful isolation. The “end” refers to the end of the era when this was not fully in our own hands. Now it is. A terrifying, amazing prospect. And some have made it through, but many others are falling to the temptation to give themselves up, to bury themselves and remain dead rather than risk true life.

“Once justified, I thought the strangling guilt would release me and I could catch my breath. But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one's own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.” Ch 40

Love the overall theme of spiritual training in a vaguely Celtic setting. The ending was a bit rushed, as with Wise Child. From former readings, I remembered most vividly the fact that Juniper's leaving a flaw in her Doran cloak that she thought no one would notice, resulted in her being injured by her enemy - a powerful image that stuck with me.

Entertaining mystery set in Sicily, with a structure that could have been too confusing and contrived, but somehow worked for me - the “author” is the title character's nephew, a writer working on a family saga that never gets off the ground, who visits Poldi periodically and ends up writing about her amateur sleuthing adventures instead.

Lots of local color and an eccentric MC (based on the real author's real aunt) make this an amusing way to while away a few hours. I might try reading the next adventure in the original German, hoping not to get too derailed by Bavarian dialect.

Also great to have an older woman as the energetic and sensual center of the story, egging her nephew on to live life more fully, but her periodic bouts of depression and recurrent wish to drink herself to death added a jarring note. Also, her wig slipping off kept distracting me. What did she look like without the wig? Did this not interfere with her amorous adventures? The nephew wondered this too, but she did not answer him.