Daring readers will be inspired to overcome similar challenges—and armchair travelers won’t be disappointed.
A well-paced tale of outdoor adventure.
“We are all, I suppose, confined to specific destinies and mine seems to be chasing rivers.” So writes Gaechter, who decided to mark her 35th birthday—making her ancient, by competitive kayaking standards—by traveling the length of the Amazon River from source to outlet. Why do such a thing? Because it’s there, of course, and no woman had been known to do it before, and there’s no time like the present. Still, in the company of her longtime partner and a like-minded Brit, she tackled the project, emerging 148 days later after crossing South America from the Andes to the Atlantic. The physical challenges were extraordinary, although, the author notes, “keeping a cool head is the most important skill in kayaking, though by far the most difficult to master.” There were plenty of opportunities to exercise that skill, for on top of the churning whitewater rapids and odd critters were the more dangerous denizens of the rainforest, including illegal loggers, Shining Path guerrillas whose “primary operations…now happen in remote jungle areas and involve the lucrative drug trade,” and soldiers of fortune who could be quick with the trigger finger. Then there were the more quotidian culture clashes, for, as Gaechter patiently notes, “time is a point of contention between North Americans and Peruvians,” making an important rendezvous all the more difficult to schedule. Was it worth dying in that jungle war zone in order to exercise her coveted freedom, she asks? The answer was no—but then again, as she writes, “I’d invested a lot of time and suffering already,” reason enough to press on to the next canyon, rapid, anaconda, sulk, argument, and bad feeling (“I didn’t want the person I loved acting like an asshole and lunatic, and that’s what I often felt Don was doing”) while vanquishing inner doubts. The author includes a glossary of kayak terms.
Daring readers will be inspired to overcome similar challenges—and armchair travelers won’t be disappointed.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64313-314-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
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
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