A celebration of a heroic feat sure to interest fans of aviation history.
A historic flight recounted in vivid detail.
Fighter pilot and aviation historian Hampton (The Hunter Killers: The Extraordinary Story of the First Wild Weasels, the Band of Maverick Aviators Who Flew the Most Dangerous Missions of the Vietnam War, 2015, etc.) follows Charles Lindbergh’s (1902-1974) thrilling 33-hour flight from New York to Paris, the first solo trip across the Atlantic. When he took off on May 20, 1927, he knew that past efforts had failed, but the young man, who had been a mail delivery pilot, was undaunted. Lindbergh had aspired to become a pilot since childhood: in 1912, accompanying his parents to the Army Aeronautical Trials, he felt “electrified” by flight displays. “I used to imagine myself with wings,” he said, “on which I could swoop down off our roof into the valley, soaring through the air from one river bank to the other.” Hampton portrays Lindbergh as a mediocre student with little interest in world, or even family, affairs: he ignored his father’s career failings, his parents’ estrangement, and political turmoil in the U.S. and abroad. He focused instead on flying, which is the author’s focus, as well. Although he sets the trans-Atlantic feat in the context of post–World War I America, the strongest parts of the book offer a cockpit’s-eye view of the flight. This you-are-there perspective effectively evokes the tension, risk, and skill involved, from the moment Lindbergh settles into his wicker seat, takes off from Roosevelt Field, crosses the coast of Newfoundland, and soars alone into the night above the roiling sea. Storms, fog, wind, clouds, and ice threaten him; he is beset by fatigue and roused by extreme cold and fear. Hampton’s use of technical terms, explained in a glossary, does not detract from his brisk narrative. Overwhelmed by cheering crowds in Paris and the U.S., the shy Lindbergh was disconcerted to find that he had become a hero. Hampton only briefly summarizes his later career and controversial political views, including some accusations of anti-Semitism.
A celebration of a heroic feat sure to interest fans of aviation history.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-246439-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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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