An enthusiastic account: Gifford clearly relishes the chance to retrace his idol’s steps.
The travails of an elusive 18th-century traveler, brought to life by a biographer who goes to great lengths to get under his subject’s skin.
Little is known about John Ledyard (1751–89). Indeed, first-time author Gifford tells us, we don’t even know for sure what Ledyard looked like; the portrait on the book’s cover, like all other surviving images of Ledyard, was painted long after his death. Fortunately, plenty of written documentation remains, much of it written in Ledyard’s own hand, and Gifford liberally sprinkles his own text with quotations from his subject. The Connecticut-born Ledyard attended Dartmouth College for a while and in 1776 sailed into history with Captain James Cook (they embarked on a four-year expedition during which they “discovered” Hawaii). Gifford neatly divides his work between a retelling of that historic journey and reminiscences of his own weeklong, $200-a-day stint aboard a replica of Cook’s ship. Ledyard’s journal of the Cook expedition provides plenty of insight, although Gifford points out that it was written three years after the fact and contains many dates and names that don’t match those in other historical accounts. The author also offers evidence that some of Ledyard’s personal papers have been tampered with: He discovered one letter with a passage about a meeting with a married prostitute that had been crossed out, possibly by an overly protective relative; the passage does not appear in the three-volume transcript of Ledyard documents in Dartmouth College Library. Continuing to shadow the explorer’s movements (a journey to Siberia is particularly enthralling), Gifford concludes with an account of Ledyard’s death, which occurred just before he was about to undertake another gallant trek, this time through Africa. Fittingly, his corpse was never discovered.
An enthusiastic account: Gifford clearly relishes the chance to retrace his idol’s steps.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2007
ISBN: 0-15-101218-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
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
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