A quick-reading account of a spectacular and appalling journey.
Chronicle of an adventurer’s attempts at a solo, transcontinental Antarctic ski journey.
Aston (Call of the White: Taking the World to the South Pole, 2011) is an Antarctic enthusiast, to put it mildly, and she has spent lots of time in its frigid climes. Eventually, the author decided to ski to the pole and past to the other shoreline, hundreds of miles away. Years before, two Norwegian men had successfully attempted the feat, but Aston would be the first woman to ski across without the aid of sails. The author tells her story with great urgency, duly noting the many challenges she faced: bone-cracking cold; raging winds that threatened to eat her tent; camouflaged, bottomless crevasses; equipment snafus; chilblains on the verge of sepsis; leaving her tent with the stove on: “it would take mere seconds for my tent and everything inside it to be consumed. I would be left alone, without shelter and without clothing in an Antarctic whiteout.” It is obvious from the narrative that the author both craves and fears solitude; it’s what takes her to the edge, a dark and creepy place of choking panic that occasionally touches on a madness that comes seemingly out of nowhere: “I was in a euphoric mood at the end of that first day but as soon as I crawled into the glaucous world of my small tent the nauseating sense of fear and trembling dread of the silence came flooding back.” Throughout her grueling adventure, she had her eyes and her notebook open, musing philosophically and recording the otherworldly beauty: the sun’s cinnamon glow at midwinter, water as black as licorice, an evening’s perfect metallic black and white.
A quick-reading account of a spectacular and appalling journey.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61902-347-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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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