Italian aviator and novelist del Giudice (Lines of Light, 1988) poetically exalts the mystery and the mortal balance of flight in this slender but affecting volume of essays. Comprising personal recollections set amid stories of heroism and death in WW II and after, del Giudice's transcendent writings belie the book's prosaic title. Following the account of his first solo flight (``You would place first takeoff alongside first lovemaking, for the intensity of the two is identical,'' he muses), he writes a curious dreamlike episode of two ghostly pilots on a deserted airstrip reflecting over their desperate maneuvers in the last six minutes of their doomed flight through an icy cloud. He ponders the transition from his childhood imaginings of himself as an airplane to the adult flier: ``As an airplane, I belonged to the century of the switch to things . . . a century which has solidified fantasies into objects.'' An essay titled ``Reaching Dew Point'' relates a scary episode—recounted in the most meditative fashion—of the author's flying into an immense cloud and completely losing his bearings. Torn between using the objective, emotionless jargon of the pilot in asking for help and calling out, ``Treviso radar, I do not want to die,'' he gives in to protocol, admitting, however, ``Away from flight . . . in the domain of everything else, you would have detested such a use of words as a way of hiding behind `objectivity' and `putting on a brave front.' '' Also here, strikingly reminiscent of a more recent tragedy, is a recreation of the last minutes of a 1980 flight of an Italian passenger jet that mysteriously blew up, and of its reconstruction after being fished from the sea. Fittingly, del Giudice's final essay has him flying along the route taken by Antoine de Saint- ExupÇry on the morning before his plane disappeared somewhere off Corsica in 1944. A beautifully contemplative, lyrically soaring collection of essays for the earthbound flier.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-15-100269-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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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