For the armchair hiker, a walk well worth taking.
Wielding the waspish wit he flashed in sending up the overblown aura of his chosen profession (Hacks, 1996), Wren sets off on his march into retirement by sending up himself.
It’s the kind of initially engaging idea that for most of us would best be abandoned overnight. But foreign correspondents are nothing if not doughty; you don’t get sent to the far corners of the world with an expense account by large organizations unless commitment is consistently followed by resolve. Wren said he would do it and he does, walking out of the New York Times’ mid-Manhattan office on his last day to continue on foot until he gets to the retirement home he and his wife bought in Vermont. The preparations have been elaborate (without moleskin, blisters can be terminal), the pangs of trepidation recurrent, but think of it as an opportunity for 400 footslogging miles of interior monologue. When Wren beds down alone in the woods, for example, he reflects on how much less dangerous that is than walking along a highway—or, for that matter, than the time in (name Beirut or any other famous hell-hole) when these freedom fighters (or jihadi or whatever) were out for his blood. Wren’s war stories are artfully notched into the passing scene along with his grasp of local history (“Major Andre was turned over to the Continental Army near here,” etc.). Characters met along the way, particularly in the Appalachian Trail section, all walk a lot faster than the author, never get lost, and seem strangely self-assured. Only when two youths bivouac nearby without ever seeming to notice him does Wren lapse into the bittersweet acknowledgment that the march into “senior anonymity” can still be redeemed by small victories, like finding Highway 22 without a compass.
For the armchair hiker, a walk well worth taking.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5152-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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