In this beautifully rendered narrative, a woman reveals the art of tracking both in the wilderness and in autobiography. Nyala became a professional tracker almost by chance. Having grown up in rural southern Mississippi, she saw her own track veer tragically off course when, at age 17, she dropped out of high school shortly before graduation to marry an abusive man. She had two children with him and many near-encounters with death before she decided, seven years later, to escape. But eluding her vicious ex-husband turned out to be even more difficult than getting up the courage to leave. Nyala and her children suddenly found themselves being tracked, and they learned to read the signs of their pursuer in the footprints around their house, in the sliding door left slightly ajar, in the neatly folded hand towels in the bathroom. They moved often, but one day Nyala's children disappeared, abducted by their father. While trying to regain custody, Nyala married a park ranger and began learning to track in earnest. She talks here about the process: finding the track, following its turns, walking alongside the person or animal you're trying to find. It's fascinating to watch her mark a lost person's footprint from among hundreds and to see her determinedly trace the progress of wandering hikers as they stray farther and farther from their goal. She tells of two tracking experiences in detail, and of the slow process of becoming a true tracker. And Nyala also tells how, in mastering this skill, she found her own true course again: She was reunited with her children, went back to college, and studied tracking at ever deeper levels among the Bushmen in Africa. The gripping chronicle of a tracker finding herself as she looks for others. (Book-of-the-Month/Quality Paperback Book Club selection)
Pub Date: June 16, 1997
ISBN: 0-8070-7092-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
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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