Reflective thoughts and vibrant specifics bring a nature biologist's love of the outdoors to readers.
A wildlife biologist shares some of his adventures in the field.
During his 30-year career with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (he retired in 2004), Smith (Life on the Rocks: A Portrait of the American Mountain Goat, 2014, etc.) had his fair share of “joy, wonder, and drama” in the wilderness, and he shows readers how to “discover a deeper connection and greater purpose in conserving the rich wild heritage we all share.” Each essay is a snapshot of the life of a wildlife biologist and naturalist, written with the kind of exacting details one would expect from someone trained to be observant in nature. "Long, cobalt silhouettes of junipers slipped beneath as we chased our shadow across the dissected sagelands,” he writes in the first chapter. “An immature golden eagle sporting white-banded tail feathers, the decorative plumes prized by Plains Indians, streaked past the helicopter's left door….It was a great day to be alive, soaring with the eagle." When the helicopter crashes, readers are plunged into the waist-deep snow with Smith and his companions as they struggle to find shelter and notify someone of their whereabouts. The author also shares his anguish over shooting a mountain goat, the stress of being lost on a mountainside, how he navigates an encounter with a black bear with cubs, what he does when a sudden storm appears while fishing, and the dismay he feels when he discovers previously visited areas have become devoid of life. The prose is rich with details on the flora and fauna, and it’s also nostalgic, the musings of an older man reflecting on his life, his work, and the world he loves, which he sees changing primarily due to climate change and human incursions.
Reflective thoughts and vibrant specifics bring a nature biologist's love of the outdoors to readers.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8816-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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