Icy adventure, dramatically recounted, about wintering over in a 36-foot sailboat frozen into place north of the Arctic Circle. It may or may not be coincidence that the most popular explorer/adventure books in recent years have taken place at high altitude (Everest) or low latitude (Alaska). A long-time adventure sailor, Simon is a veteran of expeditions in the Southern Hemisphere, including treks into Borneo. But it was the romance of the Arctic that called him for what was to be his and his wife Diana’s last major exploration. It took them nearly two years to prepare, including finding the 36-foot steel boat that was to be their home and anchoring for a winter in Maine to practice cold-weather survival. Come spring, they set out for Baffin Bay in search of a cove sufficiently protected to keep their mission from being suicidal, and sufficiently remote to satisfy Alvah’s hunger for quest. They barely made safe harbor before the ice began to close in. Soon after, Diana was flown out to New Zealand to be with her terminally ill father. With emergency service shut down for the winter and 24 hours of darkness setting in, Alvah was isolated with their cat, Halifax. His months alone evolved into a spiritual search that changed his life. He also endured extraordinary mechanical challenges that included temporary blindness from carbon monoxide. So transformed was he by his months alone in darkness and cold that when Diana finally returned, he was slow to accept her presence. Besides his soul-searching, there are also evocative observations of Arctic flora and fauna, including a literally death- defying but liberating encounter with “Nanook,” the gigantic polar bear of the Arctic. A platform on behalf of preserving the Arctic ecology and its Inuit culture, but no pretense regarding scientific or cultural research here. Simon launched this adventure for his own satisfaction, and he achieved that, perhaps on behalf of us all.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-07-058052-9
Page Count: 328
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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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