A light, travel-going pleasure. (Line drawings throughout)
A rangy gathering of travel pieces without airs.
Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for her feature writing at the Baltimore Sun, Steinbach (Without Reservations, 2000) claims modest intentions. “I wanted to study things that interested me in places that I found interesting,” she writes, to “offer a story about what I set out to learn and what I came back knowing.” The writer doesn’t expect her journeys to be travail-free, but she does like to travel in a measure of comfort, so her experiences need to be engaging enough to convince the next editor to finance her next freelance fancy. And they are: Steinbach is either a good faker, or she’s having the time of her life. She has serendipity on her side, too; she might be flummoxed in looking for a bonsai garden off a medieval street in Florence, but then she stumbles upon a rare opportunity to enter a private palazzo, which was “like opening a plain cardboard box and finding a Fabergé egg inside.” The author observes the architecture of Havana, takes a writing workshop in the Czech Republic, learns the Wakayagi style of dance in Kyoto, and studies French cooking at the Ritz, but these adventures often simply provide backgrounds for the people she meets; Steinbach has the humility to know a guide worth listening to. She basks in simple delights: “I bought a huge cup of pistachio gelato and sat eating it in the dappled shade.” Readers will admire her optimism (she carried a tube of 32 SPF sunscreen on a visit to Scotland) and enjoy her goofy humor as she describes rams—“the Scottish ones, not the Los Angeles ones”—stirring at the sight of her red windbreaker, while she walks slowly, “hoping that the color red did not have the same effect on rams as it does on bulls in Pamplona.”
A light, travel-going pleasure. (Line drawings throughout)Pub Date: April 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-50441-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
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
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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