A vital addition to the library of the far north and of exploration.
“Fierce winter never relented”: searching for a little-known explorer who left his name on many places, themselves little known, in the Canadian Arctic.
It’s not enough for Castner (All the Ways We Kill and Die, 2016, etc.) to have survived roadside bombs in Iraq, an experience he recounted in The Long Walk (2012). Now he sets off in search of Arctic explorer Alexander Mackenzie (1764-1820) and the river named for him, the second longest in North America, which traverses a country of few humans and plenty of bears. As the author writes appreciatively at the opening, the Mackenzie River is “so wide that the far bank appeared to be little more than a slight film of green,” while the island that stands at the river’s egress into the Arctic Ocean “is larger than five Manhattans.” He adds, “everything about [it] is enormous.” So it is, with an appropriately big story to match. Castner handles its several components skillfully, covering all the bases: for one, he provides a lively biography of Mackenzie, the youngest principal in the Northwest Company, contending not just with the rigors of exploration, but also with early corporate politics. For another, he covers the territory, traveling in what he conjectures to be Mackenzie’s footsteps and paddle traces in search of the fabled, elusive Northwest Passage, a pathway now easier to chart given thawing permafrost and melting ice caps. Every American knows the story of Lewis and Clark, Castner writes, surely too charitably; why, then, would we not know of Mackenzie and his legendary explorations? “And if I could trace the Missouri and Colorado rivers,” he writes, “if I knew how the Hudson and Lake Champlain got their names, how could I not do the same for this river, greater than them all?” In the end, that challenge is rhetorical, for Castner pays for that knowledge with no end of sweat, toil, and even some blood and tears.
A vital addition to the library of the far north and of exploration.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-385-54162-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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