Not all of the adventures lead to insights for readers, but most will enjoy the trip nonetheless.
A mix of autobiography and research comprises this exploration of what we fear and how we fear it.
Journalist and photographer Yogis (Saltwater Buddha: A Surfer's Quest to Find Zen on the Sea, 2009) shares an anecdote about his childhood, telling how he loved doing math as a child until a failed test somehow instilled a "fear memory" so deep inside him that he has avoided math as much as possible ever since. Understanding fear—how the split-second instinctual reaction trumps cognitively understanding the risks involved and how to ameliorate the fear afterward—led Yogis to embark on what he refers to as "an obsession" with exploring a subject not often discussed. This obsession led him to experience firsthand some common fear-inducing situations, as well as personal fear-trigger circumstances, to take a closer look at his responses and learn more about universal responses. Yogis relates scientific research as naturally as a conversation with a friend—often, the book reads as though it was transcribed rather than written. The author fluidly links discussions of frontal lobes, the modern adaptations of fight or flight and negativity bias with his own experiences—e.g., his foray into some of the most dangerous surfing conditions in the world. Yogis pulls these unusually fear-inducing situations in some surprising directions.
Not all of the adventures lead to insights for readers, but most will enjoy the trip nonetheless.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60961-176-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Rodale
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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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