A fine slice out of Mowat time, along with the sound of voices so remote that they take your breath away and rouse your...
A 1966 journey across northern Canada, much of it above the Arctic Circle.
Here’s vintage Mowat (Aftermath, 1996, etc.), highly evocative and in full piss-and-vinegar mode, from the land he loves best. The Canadian government, in 1966, is in the midst of a “clearance scheme” to move Inuit populations to locations more convenient for controlling them. This, justly, raises Mowat’s ire, especially as it’s accompanied by moves to exploit any resources found in the area. The propaganda message sent out by the Canadian government was that the far north was a barren wasteland with few inhabitants, and it’s Mowat’s intent to disabuse Canadians of such malarkey and let the people who live in the area, both the Inuit and those of European origin, speak for themselves. Long passages are in the words of the inhabitants, from administrators who realize that, in a better world, the Inuits’ “real jobs would be doing what they’ve always done, and really like doing” to an Inuit explaining how his people “mostly think and talk about the past. Never talking about the future more than a day or two away. . . . Life for them is right now; but looking back too.” The notion is particularly poignant as the Inuits’ cultural history is falling apart all around them as a result of the relocation program. Mowat deploys a two-pronged attack. Fully appreciating that some Canadians may not give a hoot about the Inuit, he sharply describes the vibrant, beautiful, living world of the Arctic north and its fabulous (albeit overhunted) wildlife. But never far away are instances of segregation, disease, missionary interference, wrongheaded—culturally genocidal—governmental actions. Mowat isn’t one to let them pass unmentioned.
A fine slice out of Mowat time, along with the sound of voices so remote that they take your breath away and rouse your instinct to wonder—just as Mowat wished.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58642-061-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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
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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