The perfect summer read about an exceptional summer destination.
Journalist Sterba (Wall Street Journal) glowingly recalls Mount Desert, a Maine island where he and his wife, writer Frances FitzGerald, spend their summers.
The cabin, surrounded by cedars, spruce, and pine trees, overlooks a fjord; an alternate view features seabirds and lobster-trap buoys. It’s full of books (as befits two authors) and also contains a fireplace made from local granite and a life-size golden Buddha from Vietnam. Sterba came to the island in 1983 as FitzGerald’s weekend guest. The “entertainment”—better known as the FitzGerald Survival School—included jumps into the ocean’s icy waters and “walks up and down mountains that would have been called forced marches in many of the world’s armies.” But he survived and was invited for another weekend that fall; the next summer FitzGerald invited him for a week. They began seeing each another in New York and eventually married. Although the story takes place over one summer, each chapter includes delightful tangents: Sterba’s early years as a cub reporter with the New York Times, the art of mushrooming, the history of the island and its occupants. The author reminisces about the island’s chief librarian and part-time police officer, probably the only person in the area “with a working knowledge of both the Dewey decimal system and the police response code.” We also meet the poem-writing editor of the local paper (“Why doesn’t the woodpecker / Rattle his brains / When he hammers a tree / Or the windowpanes?”) and a freelance author with a secret past. (He starred in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.) During the warm summer days, Sterba listens to marine radio (tracking rescue operations), the weather report, and the musings of lonely fishermen. Friends come to visit and are fed; recipes are recorded. The author’s prose is lovely, his self-deprecating humor endearing. Eventually, the summer and the book wind to a close: back to the real world, but not without a sigh of satisfaction.
The perfect summer read about an exceptional summer destination.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8021-1747-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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
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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