Flying was Edgerton’s crazy love, and his story of the affair goes ineluctably from the smitten and folksy to the fraught....
What started with Edgerton (Lunch at the Piccadilly, 2003, etc.) learning to fly airplanes comes full circle through war, then back home to a horizon full of doubts.
Edgerton’s mother was protective, but she also wanted her boy to be independent and worldly, so she agreed to let him fly, first in high school, then as a ROTC candidate in college. As Edgerton patiently explains the fundamentals of flying—from physics to check lists, instrumentation, lifting off, landing, recovering from stalls (Edgerton will make your hair bristle here)—he conveys the distinct personalities of aircraft and his own experiences with them: Cherokee 140, Laredo, T-41, T-37, T-38, F-4, and the OV-10 that he later flew on missions in Vietnam. Before then, though, each plane was a passage toward a destiny he couldn’t have imagined, each one a bit of training with fun and high jinks, mock dogfights, nights spent stealing the general’s car. Edgerton brings an energy and innocence to these proceedings, though they prepare neither him nor the reader for what was to come when he shipped to Japan. There was the real possibility of nuclear engagement with North Korea, but that fact slipped over his head. What couldn’t pass him by were bombing runs on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, or searching for downed pilots, many of them lost forever (though they maintained radio contact while on the ground for some time). Since then, Edgerton has done a lot of brooding about his war years, about how flying, once so bright and pure, became a vehicle for misgivings that collapsed into discomfort and dread, then regret. He even has a swansong later in life, but his nose gets dirtied and he’s ready to hang up the goggles.
Flying was Edgerton’s crazy love, and his story of the affair goes ineluctably from the smitten and folksy to the fraught. File under, “Icarus.”Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2005
ISBN: 1-56512-426-X
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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