An insightful memoir on one man’s quest to know living birds by examining those birds that have ceased to exist.
A new birder discovers a fascination with extinct birds.
Hollars’ (English/Univ. of Wisconsin, Eau Claire; This Is Only a Test, 2016, etc.) fascination with birds, living and dead, began with the possible rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker, long thought extinct, in the swamps of Arkansas. Similar in size and coloring to the pileated woodpecker, the ivory-billed woodpecker was hunted for its feathers and meat to the point of annihilation. Through books and interviews with ornithologists, Hollars tracks the saga and demise of this particular woodpecker, which leads him deeper into the extinct-bird arena. He muses on passenger pigeons, once numbering in the billions, a lone pair of goshawks discovered in 1935 and the hermit who lived in the Wisconsin wilderness and tried to protect them, and the dusky seaside sparrow, which was wiped out in part due to the building of the Kennedy Space Center. He examines the early methods humans used to study birds—shoot, stuff, draw, and/or paint likenesses—that eventually caused the birds’ demise and juxtaposes those with the joy birders feel when they add a bird to a life list. Hollars also shares the awe he felt when he finally saw and held the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker (even if it was a stuffed specimen in a dusty museum drawer). Although the text is a bit dry, birders and naturalists will enjoy the author’s descriptions of birds and their environments; his writing clearly displays his enthusiasm for the subject, and he balances it nicely with historical research embedded throughout each chapter. The author’s examination of extinct birds can only raise awareness and concern for the species that are still on this planet.
An insightful memoir on one man’s quest to know living birds by examining those birds that have ceased to exist.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9642-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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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