Empowering and suitably commemorative.
A world-record–holding professional triathlete enthusiastically shares a life devoted to sports, her “drug of choice.”
Early on in her amiable memoir, Wellington admits to being “accident-prone and low on common sense.” That fact hardly prevented her from pursuing a career in the high-octane arena of competitive sports. Enjoying a happy childhood in eastern England, Wellington was raised by parents who, while they loved the outdoors, displayed none of the athletic prowess she’d nurtured throughout her adolescence, a time plagued with anorexia, bulimia and alcohol binging. Her burgeoning interest in corporate law took a backseat to environmental-development work and concurrent marathon runs, which served to fuel an interest in triathlon training in Nepal and assorted adventures honing her craft in Switzerland. She began training with noted Australian coach Brett Sutton and continued onward to triathlon competitions worldwide. Wellington traces her personal history through memories and diary entries. But most compelling are the urgent details on the meticulous preparatory routines and rituals necessary to become physically (and mentally) ready to compete in these grueling contests. Later candid chapters on her morphing relationship with Sutton, revelations on life and love and her record-setting racing record effectively gel to illustrate the strife and struggle as well as the victorious exhilaration inherent with training, competing in and winning the Kona Ironman Triathlon. She concludes with comments on the completion of her 13th Ironman race in 2011.
Empowering and suitably commemorative.Pub Date: May 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4555-0557-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Center Street/Hachette
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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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