For over 20 years, Hebard has devoted much of her time to saving people's lives as part of a human-canine volunteer rescue team. This is her inspirational, often heartrending tale, cowritten with Whittemore (Find the Magician!, 1980, etc.). Hebard is one of the pioneers in this type of rescue work. Her earliest cases involve finding hikers and children lost in the woods, as well as missing elderly peopleall in the proximity of her suburban New Jersey home. Working with her personally trained German shepherdsshe's had several different faithful partners over the yearsher growing reputation eventually leads her to be called upon to find victims after various national and foreign disasters: earthquakes in Mexico City and Armenia, hurricane Hugo in South Carolina, and most recently, the bombing at the Oklahoma City federal building. Rescue missions are grueling and dangerous, often requiring that both human and canine partners climb over and through piles of rubble and debris in order to get inside collapsed buildings where survivors might be located. It is often grim work as well; more often than not, Hebard must mark the locations of dead bodies her team has found. Her return home from missions is often difficult psychologically, since she must quickly switch gears from rescue worker to wife and homemaker for her physicist husband and four children. Currently a co-leader of the US Disaster Team Canine Unit, Hebard is dedicated to improving the performance of canine search-and-rescue teams; between missions, she conducts symposiums in her field, emphasizing the importance of love and trust between human and canine partners. Compelling reading, but because of all the disaster-site details, not for the squeamish. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-553-09951-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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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