A courageous and meticulous doctor follows his dreams, saving a few lives and flying more than a few passengers to their...
A physician slowly departs the breakneck life of a surgeon for the thrills of a career in the air in this memoir.
“It seemed all the stars were aligned” when the young Crawley arrived in Spokane, Washington, for the medical internship described in this follow-up to his 2013 memoir, A Mile of String. Crawley, newly married, had a family on the way and a burgeoning career as a physician before him. But his path wouldn’t be free of heart-stopping challenges and derring-do. Over the course of the book’s pages, the reader is privy to the joys and sorrows of a medical intern at a large hospital, a family physician, a novice flight surgeon, and a commercial airline pilot. Readers see Crawley diagnosing and rehydrating a severely ill little girl, presiding over the death of an infant while his own daughter Jill is being born healthy in an adjoining room, and, later, stitching up a sailor who “needed to have his face re-attached” as a flight surgeon for the Navy Reserves. It’s during this time in the Reserves that Crawley discovered a great love of aircraft and, eventually, of flying them. “With the canopy open and the wind blowing in my face, I could feel the adrenaline flowing through my body,” he writes of his first solo flight. “It was a wonderful kind of excitement, both exhilarating and scary at the same time.” The language can tend toward the clinical: “I made a short incision just proximal and anterior to the medial malleolus (the prominent bony knob on the inner aspect) of the ankle.” And while medical professionals and seasoned pilots will likely nod their heads and smile (or wince) at just the right times, the rest of the readers may, from time to time, find themselves scratching their cranial epidermis. But the larger story Crawley has to relate here—that of a young man who mastered one profession and then, driven by passion, conquered another—remains an inspiring one. “Never be afraid to follow the path to your dreams,” Crawley writes. “It will make all the difference.” In this detailed and emotionally honest narrative, he certainly proves that, at least in his own case, the advice is sound.
A courageous and meticulous doctor follows his dreams, saving a few lives and flying more than a few passengers to their destinations on the way.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5150-0968-9
Page Count: 404
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
