Though without the exuberance of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, Hansen’s big biography does a good job of showing how and why...
The first human on the moon is a nice guy, writes admiring biographer Hansen (History/Auburn Univ.), but one not afraid of fighting and politicking to be the first.
When, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface from Apollo 11, the spacecraft he commanded, the world united for a minute. Russian communist newspaper Pravda called the crew “three courageous men,” while a Czech commentator said, “This is the America we love, one so totally different from the America that fights in Vietnam.” Even the French joined in, with France-Soir calling the landing “the greatest adventure in the history of humanity.” By Hansen’s account, Armstrong had a certain affect on people; though he was customarily the youngest (and smallest) of his military cohort, he had all the grit, diplomatic skill and tenacity necessary to get things done. He also had a talent for walking away from near-misses with death, both as a carrier-based Navy pilot during the Korean War and as a NASA test pilot in the California desert. Though Hansen can be portentous (noting, for instance, that the etymology of “Neil” is either “cloud” or “champion”), he is not inclined to reflexive hero worship. The Armstrong he presents is capable of scrapping bitterly with hero and fellow test pilot Chuck Yeager (who, Armstrong said, was a good flyer but “seemed to have less interest in precision and getting information and drawing conclusions,” as a test pilot was supposed to), and equally capable of pulling rank (he beat out Buzz Aldrin to be first out Apollo’s door). To his credit, too, Hansen enjoys demolishing myths, showing that the small-town stargazer who supposedly gave Armstrong his start was merely a good self-promoter and that Yeager had nothing on Armstrong in the cool department.
Though without the exuberance of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, Hansen’s big biography does a good job of showing how and why Armstrong has entered the history books.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-5631-X
Page Count: 848
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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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