The bizarre life of a daredevil pioneer pilot, trained in the Wright Brothers” school, who became a visionary inventor, entrepreneur, spellbinding salesman of possibilities rather than solid achievements, showman, engineer (MIT), manipulator of trusting investors” vanishing capital, liar, and deadbeat, of whom it was said he spent more time in bankruptcy court than in church. Mansfield (In the Memory House, not reviewed, etc.) attempts to bring to life a complex, extraordinary personality in rapidly changing times of developing technology. Few early pilots (1908—11) died a natural death as they sought to understand and master aerodynamics, changing winds that threatened the stability of flimsy biplanes, and temperamental engines suddenly losing power. Atwood often risked death as he learned by trial and error. To maintain a precarious living, barnstorming aviators became daring stuntmen in a circus atmosphere of cheering crowds at state fairs. The restless Atwood showed great imagination and worked many hours to gain hundreds of patents. To attract research money, he wove together truth and lies with partial successes and failures. Mansfield writes of Atwood’s wealth and poverty succeeding each other as he strove to become the Henry Ford of aviation—designing, manufacturing, and selling his product. During WWII he contributed to the famous Higgins boat, essential in invasions that helped to achieve victory. He also led a complicated private life, marrying five times and becoming an adoring yet despotic father, walking away from his children for extensive periods. Before dying at 83, Atwood had a warm reunion with his family, long scattered by geography and time. Mansfield likens Atwood to the skylark, because he had the instincts of a bird flying as high as he could in a kind of limitless space. A large slice of America’s not-well-known past and of an eccentric genius who helped develop modern aircraft. A well- researched, honest evaluation of a man and his times.
Pub Date: April 23, 1999
ISBN: 0-87451-891-1
Page Count: 324
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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