Charming and surprisingly quirky, providing the perfect escapist fantasy for couch potatoes and weekend warriors alike.
Extreme-endurance athlete Karnazes chronicles his running career.
It didn’t begin auspiciously. After a single high-school season on the cross-country team, he quit and didn’t run again until his 30th birthday. That night, after a drink at the bar, he ran 30 miles from San Francisco to Half Moon Bay—a mere sprint compared to the distances he’s covered since then. Karnazes has engaged in athletic contests that test the limits of human endurance: 100-mile runs, back-to-back marathons, treks across Death Valley, and one memorable marathon across the snows of Antarctica. (His competitors used snowshoes; he wore sneakers.) With plain talk and plenty of inspirational quotes, Karnazes tells readers just what it’s like to run 20 miles up a mountain side and know that 80 miles remain, how leg muscles feel when cramp strikes, and where the mind wanders when the body is punished so severely. Reading his account of his first 100-Mile Endurance Run, the reader winces as his blisters are lanced, then plugged with Super Glue, and cringes when he takes a wrong turn that adds distance to an already impossibly long trail. Karnazes does a lot of thinking about the reasons he took up such a demanding hobby. He can’t say exactly why, though he surmises that it may be linked to the death of his beloved 18-year-old sister Pary in a car accident. He also points to the comfort of having clearly defined goals (races are conceptually simple affairs) and wonders whether he might have obsessive-compulsive disorder. Whatever his reasons, Karnazes has made a life for himself in which he runs thousands of miles a year, sleeps only four hours a night, holds down a day job in business, and almost never misses his son’s ballgames.
Charming and surprisingly quirky, providing the perfect escapist fantasy for couch potatoes and weekend warriors alike.Pub Date: March 17, 2005
ISBN: 1-58542-278-9
Page Count: 280
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
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