An addictive book for nature lovers.
An expert tree-climber and wildlife cameraman introduces readers to a handful of his favorite trees and related adventures.
Aldred has vast filming experience with National Geographic and other outfits, and his specialty is climbing massive trees to set up blinds or just get the shot that a particular scene demands. Here, the author highlights 10 serious climbs—from England to Borneo to the Congo to Costa Rica to Morocco to Peru—detailing the lengths he and his colleagues have gone to arrange for such shoots. Each chapter is a stand-alone story in its own right, with drama, shocks, grimy interludes, and unparalleled views. While Aldred is clearly obsessed with trees, he also respects them greatly and takes all the caution necessary to climb trees that sometimes reach more than 300 feet. The book wouldn’t be complete without the author’s facing plenty of physical and mental challenges, including cerebral malaria, maggots crawling under his skin, and trying to get a footing on the perfect, thorn-laden branch to get a photo of a harpy eagle nesting—as its mother attempts to poke at his eyes. Aldred does two things particularly well: He avoids being unnecessarily macho, and he pauses to commune with the trees and to appreciate their history and the sanctuary he finds in their sky-high branches. “Whether the soft shimmering glow of a beech canopy in springtime, or the vast sun-blasted canopy of a tropical giant,” he writes, “each tree has a unique character, and it is the privileged feeling of getting to know them a little better—of physically connecting with them, if only for a short while—that draws me back into their branches time and time again.” Truly connecting with these behemoths might mean encounters with dangerous creatures or the pleasure of admiring a gorgeous poison-dart frog carrying its tadpoles on its back “high up into the canopy to deposit them within water-filled bromeliads.”
An addictive book for nature lovers.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-47305-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
