It’s no Young Men and Fire, but Santos provides a good summary of terrible events and their aftermath.
New York Times Phoenix bureau chief Santos looks into a lightning-caused blaze that killed 19 Arizona firefighters in the summer of 2013.
Early on in her first book, the author notes that while the fire itself was the agent of death, it was a string of miscommunications and guesswork—preventable but, in retrospect, seemingly inevitable human error—that sent the Granite Mountain Hotshots to their doom. Determining responsibility for those miscommunications and the poor judgment that resulted has riven the city of Prescott, the Hotshots’ home, and especially its politicians. When considering whether to disband the elite unit, “the only one to have a city as its employer, and only one of two to operate under the auspices of a structural fire department,” city officials had to wrestle more with questions of money and liability than they did the rightness or the necessity of keeping such a team on the books. (There was talk, Santos writes, of privatizing the venture, an idea that is still current.) The events of the fire were well-covered in the national media, in part by this author. Less well known are some of these post-mortem matters, her coverage of which makes a valuable contribution to the literature of disaster preparedness and management—and given that wildfire is a growing problem in the ever more arid West, that literature needs all the good work it can get. As a narrative, though, the book is less satisfying; the prose is flat, and it has all the hallmarks of a stretched-out newspaper story, with the usual clichés, set pieces, and stock descriptions: “Christopher MacKenzie, thirty, was single and a bit of a Don Juan, with a huge shoe collection, entering his ninth fire season”; “Doppler radars look like giant golf balls perched atop squat buildings or steel towers”; “Those were the ingredients for the disaster that was about to unfold.”
It’s no Young Men and Fire, but Santos provides a good summary of terrible events and their aftermath.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-05402-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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