A sensitive portrayal of a family tragedy needlessly escalated by the insensitive bureaucracy of insurance companies.
The story of the plane crash that tragically broke apart one family and set up some disturbingly complex insurance and liability issues.
In his nonfiction debut, magazine journalist Fowler pieces together the compelling story of Minnesota native Toby Pearson and his unfortunate ties to the crash of a noncommercial airplane that went down in the vast woodlands near Lake Superior. That small aircraft was carrying Pearson’s wife and two daughters. Although his wife died in the crash, his daughters miraculously survived, albeit with life-changing burn injuries and trauma that would burden them the rest of their lives. As the bills for his daughters’ injuries mounted, Pearson was faced with the possibility of his insurance company not paying out for his daughters’ injuries, and he became embroiled in a labyrinthine mess of a legal situation that can be traced all the way back to the pilot of the downed plane having initially given fraudulent insurance information, a misstep that had the potential to make Pearson’s already difficult situation a lot worse. What’s more, now Pearson faced a significant battle with a multibillion-dollar insurance company. Fowler does a meticulous job of getting readers acquainted with Pearson and his family and providing a solid account of their lives before and after the crash. He manages to solidify the personal angle of the Pearsons’ harrowing story while also using this as an entry point into a larger investigation into both lax aviation safety standards in the private/noncommercial field and questions of who is liable for what damage according to the insurance industry. The author’s maintenance of this balance between the more delicate intimacies of Toby Pearson’s post-crash family life and the more reportorial and investigative side of the book works well.
A sensitive portrayal of a family tragedy needlessly escalated by the insensitive bureaucracy of insurance companies.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-02622-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
