Engaging cross-cultural tale of ancient peoples and modern desires.
Fusion of geological treatise and adventure yarn, exploring the mysteries of Central American jade.
During his research about explorer Alexander von Humboldt, Helferich (Humboldt’s Cosmos, 2005, etc.) learned about jade’s importance to pre-Columbian societies: “To peoples such as the Maya, jade was not only heartbreakingly beautiful but supremely powerful.” Over time, archaeological expeditions revealed a trail of discoveries that proved the Mesoamericans used jade to create objects for every purpose, and even considered it to have mystical powers. Yet the sources of the mineral remained lost. Through much of the 20th century, adventurers like Edward Thompson, who recovered more than 5,000 jades from a sacred Mayan well in 1909, added to the historical record while shamelessly shipping their finds off to sponsors and museums like the Peabody, without solving this fundamental mystery. In the early 1970s, an American speculator named Jay Ridinger impulsively relocated to San Miguel, Mexico, and became intrigued by the idea of searching for jade. Ridinger would be credited with the revival of the Central American jade industry, although for years it appeared a fool’s errand, especially considering that only certain types of Asian jade were then considered valuable. (Helferich notes that in both Olmec and Chinese cultures, jade “was considered nothing less than virtue incarnate.”) In Guatemala, Ridinger and his prospecting partner (who eventually became his wife, and continues to run their business) were regarded as “idiotas, outlandish but harmless”—until they found a jade deposit near the Motagua River and purchased the surrounding acreage. Despite numerous setbacks, including the threat of civil war, the Ridingers eventually established a business, creating new carvings that represented jade’s “deep history and its ties to the great civilizations of the past.” Helferich delivers a lively narrative, notwithstanding passages focused on the scientific minutiae underlying the Ridingers’ improbable success.
Engaging cross-cultural tale of ancient peoples and modern desires.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7627-6351-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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