Your average bear has never heard of Ledyard, true enough, but this brisk biography should catch the...
A fast-paced account of America’s first great explorer.
John Ledyard was born in 1751 Connecticut, died in Cairo, and traveled almost everywhere else imaginable in the intervening 37 years. The heart of journalist Zug’s bio details Ledyard’s travels, of course, but the author is to be commended for paying scrupulous attention to Ledyard’s early life as well. In the opening chapter, on Ledyard’s childhood, Zug (Squash, 2003, etc.) manages to give a real flavor of colonial life: in just nine pages, we get religion, children’s games, family networks, and romance. Chapter two, chronicling Ledyard’s brief stint at Dartmouth, begins to suggest Ledyard’s temperament. In college, Ledyard read Virgil, directed a play, and went backpacking on what would one day be the Appalachian Trail. But the highlight of his academic career was his exit—after only one year, Ledyard simply took off, running the Connecticut River in a canoe and winding up back at his grandfather’s farm in Hartford. At loose ends, the young man decided to travel—“I allot myself a seven year’s ramble more,” he wrote to a cousin. This “ramble” turned out to be more than postcollege aimlessness; it was a vocation. Zug chronicles the travels, which took Ledyard to the Sandwich Islands with Captain Cook and along the Alaskan coast to look for the Northwest Passage. He spent time in Lapland, St. Petersburg, and Paris, where he was virtually adopted by Thomas Jefferson. The character that emerges is a complicated one: Ledyard was sometimes manic and sometimes overwhelmed by despair; he was a rough explorer, but he loved clothes (in all his letters, he described his wardrobe before saying anything about his itinerary or adventures). He was courageous and sociable, but a loner. And he wanted to be famous. Thanks to Zug’s fascinating re-creation of his adventuring, Ledyard is well on his way.
Your average bear has never heard of Ledyard, true enough, but this brisk biography should catch the Early-America-Founding-Fathers craze.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-465-09405-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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