Unlike the pilots of ASA 529, Pomerantz is in control all the way in this spellbinding and horrifying death ride.
A heart-in-your-throat story of a small commercial plane headed for a crash landing.
Atlantic Southeast Airways Flight 529 wasn’t in the air long when a loud explosion called passengers’ attention to the left wing, where the engine had been shredded and was now wreaking havoc on the plane’s stability (an investigation later showed that a propeller blade had broken, throwing the whole engine out of balance). Pomerantz (Journalism/Emory Univ.; Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, 1996) takes readers through the ensuing nine-plus minutes as the plane rapidly, but never wildly out of control, lost altitude. There were 29 people on the flight and, through interviews with those who survived, plus material from the National Transportation Safety Board, rescue personnel, doctors, and lawyers, the story is reassembled in suspenseful detail. Edgy paragraphs jump between the thoughts and actions of the passengers and the three-person crew. A suitable amount of biographical detail showing that these were everyday folk headed to Gulfport, Mississippi, from Atlanta—engineers, teachers, a sheriff, a dockmaster, a minister—invites readers to identify, and they will. First the plane shudders, then stabilizes, then violent tremors hit. One man is wondering how bad it is when he looks at a passenger with a window seat: “He’s got a better view than I do and he’s got tears in his eyes.” The plane never makes it to the airport, landing in a hayfield at 138 miles per hour, bouncing, spinning, and breaking apart. Just when you think the worst is over, it gets worse, with a fire burning at 1,800 degrees. The escape from the flames is simply terrifying. The crash investigation and the follow-up on the survivors allow readers to let muscles loosen and blood return to their knuckles.
Unlike the pilots of ASA 529, Pomerantz is in control all the way in this spellbinding and horrifying death ride.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60633-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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