A readable book that shows how natural disaster spurred scientific inquiry.
A veteran science journalist illuminates the significance of the biggest earthquake ever recorded in North America.
In his first book, New York Times reporter and editor Fountain combines scientific expertise and human interest storytelling to detail the devastation wreaked by the massive 1964 earthquake and explain why it hasn’t gotten more attention and has been all but forgotten less than 60 years later. As the author makes clear, the quake, which took place on Good Friday, March 27, was truly a horrific disaster to experience: its magnitude was 9.2, and it lasted “the better part of five minutes, which is an eternity for an earthquake.” Furthermore, “the energy released was equivalent to thousands of A-bombs,” and it opened cracks that were 6 feet wide, 4 feet deep, and a quarter-mile long. Yet because the region most severely affected was underpopulated, it never achieved the notoriety of smaller California quakes through the decades. The human cost was some 130 casualties, many from the giant waves that engulfed small coastal villages. Fountain relates much of the narrative through the perspective of George Plafker, “a geologist with the US Geological Survey” who, at 35, “was already something of an old Alaska hand.” Plafker arrived in the wake of the earthquake and used what he learned to advance the theory of plate tectonics, which is “now considered as consequential as Darwin’s theory of evolution (although plate tectonics was the work of many people not one man).” The author provides a narrative counterpoint through the perspective of a young female teacher who saw the village surrounding her one-room schoolhouse destroyed. Though Fountain never achieves the novelistic drama of Jon Krakauer or Sebastian Junger in their bestselling man-against-nature books, he succeeds in showing why this particular earthquake and its aftermath are worth remembering.
A readable book that shows how natural disaster spurred scientific inquiry.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-90406-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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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