Fleming’s contributions to history are too often lost in such minutiae, and only the most dogged reader is likely to reach...
A middling entry in the run of recent books on calendars, meridians, and like inventions.
Canadian novelist and memoirist Blaise (I Had a Father, 1993) turns his attention to the largely unknown Sandford Fleming, a Canadian railroad entrepreneur who foresaw the need to develop a system of standard time that would accommodate increasingly rapid travel. Until Fleming’s innovations were put in place, time was a matter of almost individual interpretation; in the 1880s, for instance, Bostonians set their watches 12 minutes ahead of New Yorkers, with strange effects on railroad timetables. Fleming’s development of a universal system, which included the proposal that the day opens far out in the Pacific along a longitude that no nation could claim, eliminated such hiccups, and much of it remains in place today; as the author observes, “Of all the inventions of the Industrial Age, standard time has endured, virtually unchanged, the longest.” Arriving at that standard time, however, required endless calculation and a surprising level of international political haggling. Blaise is quite good at describing the arcana of timekeeping, and he has a deep knowledge of the cultural history of an era in which technological revolution was an almost daily commonplace. But, perhaps belying his English-professor past, he offers a narrative that is clotted with asides on what poets and novelists have had to say about the matter of time (“Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, García Márquez, and Vargas Llosa have taken Faulknerian time, Proustian time, the Catholic calendar, and even a bit of pre-Columbian aboriginal time to keep history alive for the creation of their own sophisticated myths of eternal return”)—asides that have precious little bearing on his ostensible subject and seem designed only to show off the his trove of literary allusions.
Fleming’s contributions to history are too often lost in such minutiae, and only the most dogged reader is likely to reach the story’s end.Pub Date: April 20, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-40176-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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