Next book

Against The Wind

A MEMOIR

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT

Colorado memoirist VanHee recalls a troubled upbringing that led him to the ski slopes and drug scene of Aspen in the wild 1970s.

Now a Vail businessman and philanthropist, VanHee introduces himself at the outset as a classic 1970s American archetype: a young, quasi-hippie Aspen ski bum who sustained himself in Colorado counterculture partly with a dishwashing gig but mainly with drug dealing and supplying (and sampling) the resort city’s notorious narcotics buffet. Seeking to make the proverbial One Last Big Score and quit the scene, he and his cronies find themselves caught in a deadly avalanche; it’s from this metaphorical and real-life limbo, buried under an unknown quantity of snow and uncertain of the severity of his injuries, that VanHee flashes back over his life story. With a father who abandoned the household early on and an inattentive mother afflicted by a weakness for bad men, VanHee grew up bouncing between Colorado and Nebraska with haphazard supervision and a penchant for trouble. When sent to military school, he actually enjoyed the novelty of structure, discipline and athleticism. Still, personal demons and major missteps derailed his young life several times. Granted a miraculous reprieve from Vietnam service, he traded college for easygoing Aspen, where he savored communing with nature, the ski slopes, celebrities, camaraderie with friends who were also anti-war and—of course—the town’s thriving drug trade. Going from pot to peyote to LSD to cocaine (and seeing acquaintances succumb to heroin), VanHee spent much of the 1970s peddling narcotics, aware that the breezy ride was getting darker and nastier. While other addiction memoirs credit recovery to the likes of AA, religion or an author’s own mighty willpower, VanHee indicates that it was thoughts of his family, however badly flawed his parents might have been, that compelled him to turn his life around. In an afterword, he explains that writing an autobiography started as a way to bond more closely with the strong, stable household he now heads, a position once unlikely for an at-risk kid from a broken home. Though the lawbreaking and vice here may be too small-time for readers hoping for salacious true-crime thrills and a deep look at the higher levels of the drug trade, VanHee’s tale is a satisfying one, well-told and with a special appeal for regional markets in the western United States. Less skiing and drugs than one might expect but still a successful account of a bumpy personal run and ultimate redemption.

Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-4820-6125-3

Page Count: 268

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 18


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2016


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist

Next book

WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 18


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2016


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist

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

Close Quickview