An important message tucked inside an unappealing bottle.
A “Sound Tracker” travels from Washington state to Washington, D.C., measuring and recording noise, ruminating, interviewing and fulminating.
The description of this odyssey is rendered in the first-person voice of Hempton, an acoustic ecologist and Emmy-winning sound recordist who provides audio clips to various media outlets and sells CDs of nature’s sounds of silence. (Freelance journalist Grossman makes an appearance late in the text as a companion and ally.) In 2005 Hempton established what he calls “One Square Inch of Silence” in Olympic National Park’s Hoh Rain Forest. He believes it is the quietest spot in America and has been lobbying hard to maintain it, principally by working to have airlines alter flight patterns to avoid national parks. After a quick explanation of how he became interested in the science of silence, Hempton takes us aboard a 1964 VW bus on an eccentric road trip that zigzags here and there to enable him to introduce us to various people—both professionals and ordinary folks—whom he enlists to tell part of the story. Many of the verbatim conversations are stilted; people talk in thick, organized and often eye-glazing paragraphs. Comments such as “another blade of grass is a different poem” sound like “Deep Thoughts” by Jack Handey. In addition, the authors’ determination to mention the brand name of apparently every item used may lead cynical readers to wonder if they received product-placement fees. (Do we need to know that the alarm clock came from Radio Shack?) Like many a True Believer, Hempton frequently employs a grating tone of moral superiority. This invites readers to look for hypocrisy: Why did he drive such a noisy, gas-wasting vehicle? He did walk the final 100 miles into D.C., where he lobbied some bureaucrats and one of his senators.
An important message tucked inside an unappealing bottle.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5908-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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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