``Keep your head down and your mouth shut'' was advice given to the would-be Surgeon General early in his Washington days; fortunately, the high-profile and controversial Koop chose otherwise, both in his career and in these lively memoirs. The ``health conscience of America'' is how Koop says he'd like to be remembered—and he is that and much more: an innovative pediatric surgeon whose skills have altered thousands of lives, a man of scientific integrity whose tenure as Surgeon General alternately delighted and confounded both the right and the left, a Bible-reading evangelical Christian with a mission, and a bloody but unbowed veteran of eight years of Washington bureaucracy. His account of his early years, though pleasant enough, is unremarkable, but his writing moves into high gear when he talks about his years as a pediatric surgeon and the painful and prolonged process of becoming confirmed as Surgeon General. Koop recounts his battles with the powerful tobacco industry; his efforts to prod the Reagan Administration to take action in the war on AIDS and his subsequent attacks from the religious right on this same issue; his stand on the Baby Doe case and the rights of handicapped children; and, as expected, his opposition to abortion. Koop concludes with brief essays on what he considers major health issues of the day, such as health insurance, preventive health care, problems of aging, nutrition and food safety, drugs and alcohol, and domestic violence: Clearly much remains on his agenda. Good stories and honest opinions from an American original, who, though now stripped of his colorful vice admiral's uniform, is not about to fade away. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-57626-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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