Anka Muhlstein, known for her biographies of Queen Victoria and James Rothschild (not reviewed), here traces the life of Robert Cavalier de La Salle, early French explorer of the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, and Texas and founder of Louisiana. She paints a pretty gripping picture of 17th-century Canada, with its tension between brawling, murderous Montreal, populated by coureurs de bois (backwoodsmen) and drunken Indians, and sober Quebec, with its farmers and administrators. We see the forests teeming with horseflies and edible ants, Iroquois war bands slaughtering Illinois villages—landscapes (to the French) terrifying, strange, and irresistible. Made owner of the land around a primitive fort called Frontenac on Lake Ontario in 1675, La Salle enriched himself via the beaver trade and mounted grueling voyages across the frozen wastes with a lifelong Indian guide, Nika. La Salle was unique among early European explorers by virtue of his intimacy with the native people, whose language he spoke. Muhlstein tries to convey something of the absurdity and unease that characterized most contacts between Europeans and Indians but is always constrained by the anecdotal nature of her enterprise. She manages simply to show La Salle's own shrewd humanity. But visionary as he was and probably, at times, half-insane, his fantastical courage and endurance could not cope with the complexity of large-scale official operations, and when he was finally commissioned by Louis XIV in 1687 to found a settlement in the territory that was not yet called Louisiana, the expedition ended in devastation and mutiny. Muhlstein's book is simply and graphically written, geared to the general reader who wants to feel the raw barbarity of frontier life rather than wade through the socioeconomic intricacies of colonial history. This makes the narrative accessible and vivid, though a surprising absence of maps makes the geographical meanderings somewhat hard to follow. Perhaps it is erroneously assumed that contemporary readers know their country as well as La Salle did.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55970-219-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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