The photographs, many mere snapshots, reinforce suspicion that this is a private memoir for distribution to family and...
An account of luxury-travel adventures for the well-to-do.
Serial entrepreneur Kent, who made his first score crafting bracelets from elephants’ tails, began life in colonial circumstances: his father was “a soldier of the King’s African Rifles who spoke fluent Swahili and had been trained as an administrator for the British Empire,” and his mother was a nurse and all-around I-can-manage person. Snakes, leopards, lions, rhinos, mosquito netting, polo ponies, curry luncheons—all were in a day’s work for the Kents. After the family manor was expropriated following Kenyan independence, they organized a bush tour and safari business. Abercrombie & Kent is now among the highest of the high-end outdoor luxury-tour packagers. The author writes affectingly of being an outsider in closed-off, class-ridden Britain (notably at Sandhurst, where, he writes, “my rather untamed upbringing in Africa clearly has been quite apart from the much more aristocratically polished backgrounds from whence my classmates come"). The experience, it seems, engendered in him a desire to prove his supposed betters wrong by becoming rich (“in my early thirties, I make my first million dollars"). With wealth and a growing business catering to the even wealthier, Kent becomes inclined to hobnob and name-drop; the latter part of his book is sprinkled with Burtons and Huttons and Radziwills and anonymes such as one “Big Apple Billionaire.” The best parts of the book will engage students of entrepreneurship, as Kent fearlessly leaps into action to take advantage of world events—calling on the Egyptian government after Sadat’s assassination, for instance, to ink an exclusive tourism deal.
The photographs, many mere snapshots, reinforce suspicion that this is a private memoir for distribution to family and clients that somehow escaped into the world. Of some interest to outsiders, though, for revealing that “Shanghai Peking duck is much better than Peking Peking duck” and similar arcana.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-229920-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2015
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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