Well short of definitive, but an entertaining summary of Cousteau’s life and career.
A warm biography of one of the icons of the environmental movement.
Matsen (Titanic’s Last Secrets, 2008, etc.) begins with the party where, as a young naval officer in 1936, Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910–1997) met Simone Melchior, the admiral’s daughter who became the mother figure for the crew of Cousteau’s famed vessel, the Calypso. Cousteau arrived at the party with a movie camera, filming everything and instantly bewitching Simone. Matsen then shifts to Cousteau’s rather odd childhood. Raised partly in France, partly in America, he was the second son of a man who worked as factotum for a millionaire American playboy. Lonely and rebellious as a child, Cousteau discovered a passion for film at a time when the medium was in its infancy. Barred by injuries from his chosen career as a naval aviator, he began swimming in the sea to rebuild the strength in his arms—and discovered a new world. Almost everything else in his life grew out of that discovery. During World War II, in between espionage missions for the Resistance, Cousteau conducted experiments in underwater photography. After the war, he perfected the Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus (SCUBA), allowing him unprecedented freedom of movement underwater. His first glimpses of the undersea world, in a short film documenting shipwrecks, took the cinema world by storm. Cousteau sure-handedly built that success into an undersea empire, finding backers, acquiring and fitting out the Calypso, traveling the world’s oceans to create new films and developing new technology to allow even more spectacular diving feats. Matsen sketches the broad outlines of his career, but the inner Cousteau—by all accounts an intensely private man—never really emerges. In between accounts of the voyages, honors and growing environmental advocacy, we learn of family feuds, tragedies and Cousteau’s long-term affair with Francine Triplet, whom he married shortly after Simone’s death. Unfortunately, few of his close companions or family members appear in these pages, and those who do share little to reveal the man behind the mask.
Well short of definitive, but an entertaining summary of Cousteau’s life and career.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-42413-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
