To be sure, some of Stafford’s mental baggage popped open during his latest crazy journey, but his chronicle is, on the...
Further tales from extreme adventurer Stafford (Walking the Amazon, 2011), European Adventurer of the Year in 2011.
The author’s latest is the stuff of nightmares: “No food, no equipment, no knife and not even any clothes.” Alone, on a remote island in the South Pacific. After his two-and-a-half-year ramble the length of the Amazon River, among traffickers, defensive locals and terrorists, what would be next? Greater duration was pointless, but as for in extremis, well, a couple months isolated on a South Pacific island, with absolutely no provisions—except for the video cameras that would record his days for the Discovery Channel—ought to do the trick. Stafford is a fit, adventure- and battle-tested, fairly normal and sociable man, so it came as little surprise that the isolation got to him. His story of those 60 days is raw and acrid, with all the pungency caught on tape clearly adding immediacy to the emotional wrench of the narrative. His physical travails were hardly negligible—the lack of fresh water drove his blood pressure through the roof (as did almost any stressful thing); “coconut tasted like whale blubber, snails like gritty balls of phlegm”; “I woke up to sharp stomach cramps and explosive diarrhea on the beach”—yet it was his mind that was pushed to the most painful places. He was edgy, frustrated, whiny and looking for someone to blame. Then came the little triumphs: building a fire, catching rainwater, finding a tin can, caramelizing coconut, hunting down a goat, and learning to focus and be serene in the face of those things he was not able to change. Ultimately, he notes why the island is uninhabited: “NO BLOODY FRESH WATER. For certain parts of the year the island produces less water than can sustain one male adult.”
To be sure, some of Stafford’s mental baggage popped open during his latest crazy journey, but his chronicle is, on the whole, entertaining.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-14-218096-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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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