by Ed McCabe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 2015
A touching memoir about a graphic artist devoting his retirement years to Christian ministerial work.
A debut memoir about a lifelong promise made to God.
When McCabe was a boy working in his father’s feed mill in rural Maryland, he spent his free time “talking to the Lord on the railroad tracks.” As these conversations grew easier, he made a deal: if God would permit him to grow up and become a successful commercial artist, he would, in return, retire at the age of 45 and spend the rest of his life serving God as a minister. He received no reply from God, but McCabe did go on to become a successful graphic artist. This plainspoken memoir doesn’t immediately move on to his professional life, however; instead, the author relates his formative years growing up with his taciturn, hardworking father and his well-intentioned mother. “Mom kept telling Dad he would be sorry someday if he did not get to know us before we got older,” he affectingly writes at one point before flatly adding, “But it was too late.” McCabe later attends the U.S. Army Combat Engineer School and then enrolls briefly in the School of Visual Arts in New York City and then the Maryland Institute College of Art before finally landing a series of jobs in the U.S. Government Printing Office in the late 1960s. Complications do arise, however: while working in the government’s Audio Visual Services Division in the late 1970s, McCabe began to experience health problems due to breathing in various chemicals from his graphics work. After some soul-searching, he retires and commences ministerial work, both in prisons and as a member of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International. Throughout this book, the author effectively relates the human side of his various employments, as well as his marriage to his wife, Janice, in a series of well-turned vignettes. Many of these stories will give readers a good sense of what midlevel government work was like on a day-to-day basis a generation ago. Christian readers, in particular, will find it especially pleasant to read this story of a good man’s life in the service of family and God.
A touching memoir about a graphic artist devoting his retirement years to Christian ministerial work.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1490866475
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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
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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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