A vivid, moving depiction of a way of life tragically becoming increasingly endangered.
An evocative meditation on shifting boundaries and the kinship we feel to other species.
In 1986, fresh out of college with a degree in fish and wildlife biology, Saulitis (Many Ways to Say It, 2012, etc.) took a job in an Alaskan fish hatchery. There, she experienced a life-changing moment when she saw a female orca, and thus began a lifelong fascination with these extraordinary creatures. The author connected with a nearby scientific group of whale watchers in Prince William Sound who were studying a population of local orcas made up of “transients” (mammal eaters) and “residents” (fish eaters). After two years of working as a volunteer, she entered a doctorate program. For her thesis, she analyzed the calls of a pod of 22 local transient orcas. During her field sessions, Saulitis recorded more than 6,000 calls, and she was able to separate them into 14 discrete call types. She then attempted to correlate these with specific behaviors—e.g., quiet calls when hunting, clicking noises to orient themselves, etc. (The author accepts that these interpretations are subjective and therefore speculative.) In 1989, the author's Alaskan idyll was shattered by the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Since then, she and her co-workers have been involved in documenting the damage to the local whale population. The group of transients she studied has been reduced by half and is no longer able to reproduce. She herself suffered a potentially life-threatening bout with cancer in 2010, but she remains optimistic. The Sound, to which she returns every year, is once again a functioning (though transformed) ecosystem.
A vivid, moving depiction of a way of life tragically becoming increasingly endangered.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1435-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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
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