Terrible title, but a good adventure story mixed with meditations on the meaning of life and death and dying. Wickwire is one of the world’s most accomplished mountain climbers. For over 30 years he has challenged the great summits: Everest, K2 in the Himalayas, Mt. McKinley, and so many others. Some of these mountains he has conquered, some have conquered him, but he has never lost his desire to climb. The descriptions of his adventures are gripping tales. Yet “off the mountains,” the writing is unengaging, despite the stylistic contributions of co-author Bullitt (Filling the Void: Six Steps from Loss to Fulfillment, not reviewed). Wickwire’s family, for instance, is present throughout the book, and he’s clearly devoted to them, yet the reader does not get more than a one-dimensional understanding of them. On the other hand, the people with whom he climbs are finely sketched; they are real and complex. Perhaps this is because when he’s not climbing, life is, both literally and figuratively, flat; perhaps only when he is in danger does he truly become alive and observant. Wickwire, however, spends little time being introspective here, until (and very effectively) near the end of the book. Both author and reader suddenly realize this book has been about death, the deaths of so many friends on the slopes: fellow climbers, a young woman he dearly loved. The brutal murder off the slopes of his law partner causes him to question hoary clichÇs about adventure: Is dying while doing what one loves any less terrible, any less terrifying, than dying another way? Why purposely put oneself in harm’s way? Seemingly disillusioned, this aging athlete responds to his crisis of faith in perhaps the only way he knows how: He climbs a mountain. In the end, the reader knows little about why people like Wickwire are addicted to danger. It may be an unanswerable question. (b&w photos) (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-671-01990-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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 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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