Shipping merchant Charles Tyng’s wonderfully vivid memoir of his wild and adventurous years as a sea boy and then captain on blue-water vessels. At the age of 13, Tyng was sent to sea, to China, by his father. The year was 1814; Tyng was a lowly, ignorant, scared, and abused sea boy. The voyage took a year and a half, and when it was done, Tyng had had enough of sailing. Tough, said his father, and so his profession was sealed. But Tyng shifted for himself, learned his craft, and climbed the rungs until he, in a terrific sleigh-of-hand, bought his first boat. What bestowed on Tyng enough exciting memories to fill a book was his hungry curiosity, taking every chance “while the boat lay at the landing to walk round and see the people, and get some idea of what was going on.” Between the summonings of port life—from opium dens to wharf-side eateries—architectural descriptions, and landscape delineations, there are North Sea gales to reckon with, pirates to outrace, boils to lance, unwanted tattoos to carve off, spells in prison to survive (“a place too horrid to think of”), and mutinies, some to partake in, others to quash. After his first unfortunate trip, Tyng took to the seas, and after a few circumnavigations (“This was the island where Capt. Cook was killed, and eaten, and I was told the Indian who killed him was still alive”), he settled down to runs across the Atlantic, taking sugar to Barcelona and wine to Havana, drumming up trade, acquiring more boats, trying to maintain order: “The bully of the crew . . . gave me a blow in my right temple, which sent me headlong in the lee scuppers.” The book ends on a cliffhanger—he is in the last stages of Asiatic cholera—when Tyng is only 32; he has another 47 years to live. Tyng’s saga, edited by his great-great-granddaughter, grips with its lively immediacy and transports with its mildly antique but always expressive language. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 7, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-88632-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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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