A simple but satisfying blend of memoir, cultural anthropology and environmental analysis.
Lessons from four grueling summers spent fishing for sockeye salmon in an isolated village on the Alaskan peninsula.
Egegik is part of Bristol Bay, one of the world’s biggest—and last remaining—sockeye salmon runs. Lured by the unparalleled beauty of the Alaskan bush, Carter (Fools Rush In: A True Story of Love, War, and Redemption, 2005) joined the team of Sharon Hart and Carl Adams, seasoned fishermen who earned their colleagues’ respect for their toughness and their peculiar brand of hospitality. The author’s struggle to fit in with the often hostile residents of Egegik prompted him to analyze the community’s warped social structure, engendered by brutal working and living conditions. He spends as much time sketching the characters in the village as he does describing their shared occupation. Hart, Adams and Carter practiced set netting, which involves stretching out a long net and waiting for the salmon to fill it, then laboriously picking out the fish, often for 15 hours at a time. Each day, the team filled their skiffs with thousands of pounds of salmon, which, like the cold water and extreme tides, surrounded the fishermen with plenty of potential complications. Despite the danger, exhaustion and near-constant physical pain, Carter could not resist returning each summer for four years. In Egegik he found a place where nature still rules, where time (as defined by “the Lower 48”) does not exist and where backbreaking work calms the mind, distilling its desires down to the basics of food, shelter and rest. In addition to providing lively anecdotes, Carter explores the larger environmental and cultural circumstances of his job with sensitivity and intelligence, couching the particularities of the fishing process and the salmon life cycle in terms a novice can follow.
A simple but satisfying blend of memoir, cultural anthropology and environmental analysis.Pub Date: May 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9706-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
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
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