An entertaining, provocative exercise in cryptozoology, best read with a modicum of suspended disbelief.
Bigfoot lives—maybe, as this X-Files–worthy tale reveals.
Toronto-based journalist Zada, who has written for the Globe & Mail, the CBC, the Toronto Star, and other publications, goes a touch out on a limb to ponder sights seen but not proven: namely, spottings of the Sasquatch, or Bigfoot, a kind of half-human, half-ape that inhabits the ancient woods of the Northwest. Traveling deep into the old-growth forests of British Columbia, he had a look for himself, and it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that he adds to the seen/unproven inventory. The fact that no definitive evidence has ever been produced, admits the author, puts the Sasquatch in a category of critter “considered by most people to be no more real than fairies or gnomes.” Bigfoot believers, he adds, explain the lack of evidence by the rarity and shyness of the creature, who knows better than to get too close to humans—even though some of the people Zada talks with, locals and visitors, claim to have seen the giants lurking at the edges of forest hamlets. Having been spooked by a sighting in a dark, dense patch of woods, Zada is inclined to believe, though he’s a good enough journalist to know that assertion without evidence isn’t likely to sway skeptics. As for true believers, well, there are plenty, many of them telling secondhand stories, such as one of a hunter who had Bigfoot in his sights but didn’t pull the trigger “because it was too human-looking.” Human, yes, and not bear, as so many claim, nor Yeti, maybe, Zada concludes, it’s not provably seen because those who are looking for it are just trying too hard. “As soon as you stop trying,” he writes, “your odds suddenly change.” Believe or don’t, the author writes nimbly and well, and his story is modest and evenhanded even as he lets us know just where he stands.
An entertaining, provocative exercise in cryptozoology, best read with a modicum of suspended disbelief.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2935-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
PROFILES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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