An engaging biography, coupled with an equally captivating national history.
An homage to debut author Sipe’s mother, who survived struggles in Poland during World War II.
After the author’s mother, Stanis?awa Emilia “Emma” Krasowska Serbinski, suffered a stroke in 2007, Sipe found two boxes of memorabilia in the attic of her mother’s home in Pennsylvania, which contained hundreds of letters. The correspondence, which began in 1941, was written in Polish, so the author had to enlist the help of a translator to decipher it. She was born in the early 1920s in Kosów Huculski, Poland (now Kosiv, Ukraine), and enjoyed a happy childhood. In 1939, when she was 19, she met Zdzislaw Eugeniusz Serbinski, the man she’d eventually marry, and she had designs on going to college. But that same year, everything changed: Adolf Hitler ordered the German invasion of Poland, and Josef Stalin began the Soviet invasion less than three weeks later. Sipe grippingly recreates her mother’s ordeal, telling of how Emma participated in the underground resistance and helped to smuggle Polish soldiers out of the country, among other tasks. For this, she was arrested by the Soviets and sentenced to eight years of toil in a labor camp. In 1941, the Sikorski-Mayski agreement provided amnesty for Polish prisoners, and both Emma and Zdzislaw made their way to Bukhara to join Ander’s Army, a new Polish military within the Soviet-controlled territory. She was eventually sent to Iran to train as a nurse, reunited with Zdzislaw in Iraq in 1943, and married him the same year in Palestine. The author presents Emma’s life as cinematically dramatic as she lives through both world wars, and through Poland’s brief independence between them. Sipe’s meticulous research is impressive, as she also furnishes a concise but thorough history of Poland’s travails and a moving account of her reflections on her own connection to Poland: “I have grown from being a reluctant Pole, to a person who is proud of her heritage.” Her prose is unfailingly clear and engrossing, and she fills the book with beautiful personal and historical black-and-white photographs.
An engaging biography, coupled with an equally captivating national history.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5043-9653-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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