A lambent chronicle of wandering north and encountering an old idea brought forcibly into a new age.
“What had happened . . . to the idea of remoteness, the sense of magisterial nature embodied in the word ‘Thule’?” asks British journalist Kavenna, who went to find out.
Ultima Thule: a glazed landscape pure and haunting, a northerly myth, frozen in silence, strange and disconcerting, far and gone. Pytheas said he had been there, Pliny the Elder felt free to describe it, Strabo had nothing but scorn to heap upon the notion, the Venerable Bede figured it was Iceland. Thule was the pea under Kavenna’s mattress; she longed to seek out “the consolations of a perfect view, the tranquility of slowness.” But where was Thule? The author followed many wayward suggestions: to Norway and Shetland and Iceland, Estonia, Greenland and Spitsbergen. She is a chromatic, poised writer with an eye for evocative images. In Oslo she heard “atonal bells striking eight outside”; in the Shetlands she “found a gate singing in the wind, and an oval-shaped ruin a few feet high.” She journeyed to Iceland, where the Victorians encountered “the devil holes, the sulphur pots, the lairs of Beelzebub,” and to the Norwegian archipelago of Spitsbergen, a two-tone frieze of rock and ice. She inhaled explorers, writers and politicos—Fridtjof Nansen, Halldór Laxness and Vidkun Quisling, for starters—as she took the measure of the Thule Society (a group also concerned with racial purity) and the bleached unknowingness of the Thule Air Base, a Cold War relic in a long line of pretenders stealing a vibrant name for political purposes. For Kavenna, Thule will always be an ancient fragment of desire and unease, a play of colors on the ice, beautiful and silent.
A lambent chronicle of wandering north and encountering an old idea brought forcibly into a new age.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03473-8
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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