A capable and readable book, though the story is likely to draw its true audience by way of the forthcoming movie it ties...
A fishing trip turns into a very bad day in this dramatic though less fraught rejoinder to The Perfect Storm.
When he fell from Anna Mary, his lobster boat, into the sea—the result, as he ruefully notes, of an avoidable bad idea—Aldridge writes that he spent some of his time in the water pondering the “if-onlys and I-should-have-dones that would have kept me from going overboard.” The rest of the time he spent pondering how to keep from falling asleep and slipping into oblivion while trying to gain a fix on where he was in the water. A skilled seaman, he did so, and his knowledge as much as his strength and good physical condition was responsible for keeping him alive for the hours he was in the water. Meanwhile, as his shipmate Sosinski writes, the crew of the Anna Mary and the Coast Guard used knowledge of their own to locate that lone swimmer in the vastness of the waters off New England. Recounting a real event that took place nearly four years ago, the partners’ narrative has its predictable moments, just as one might expect: the regrets, those what-ifs, etc. But, though by-the-numbers in spots, this book has several virtues. For one, like Peter Matthiessen’s Men’s Lives, it is a robust portrait of working-class Montauk, the Long Island community in the shadow of the tony Hamptons that always seems to be in danger of being crowded into the sea. “The real Montauk is about the fishing,” they write. “It always was.” For another, the authors offer a richly detailed but not overburdened view of how sea rescue operations are mounted and conducted: there are probabilities and formulas involved but also gut instinct and lots of experience in play.
A capable and readable book, though the story is likely to draw its true audience by way of the forthcoming movie it ties into.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60286-328-6
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Review Posted Online: April 1, 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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