A laudable effort that meets with mixed success.
The stage and screen actress delivers a memoir focused on her wildlife conservation work.
When she was the director of the National Endowment for the Arts in the mid-1990s, Alexander (Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics, 2000, etc.) famously butted heads with Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who was attempting to eliminate support for the arts from the budget. Less well known are the author’s activities in support of the conservation of endangered species. In her second memoir, Alexander chronicles her global travels to remote areas around the world—e.g., Belize, Thailand, Bhutan, Ecuador, Newfoundland, Madagascar—in search of rare wildlife. She describes accounts of the illegal, wanton killing of rhinoceroses for their horns, which are used in traditional Chinese and Indian medicine and sell for as much as $100,000 on the black market. In Thailand, the government imports elephants to satisfy the tourist trade while, at the same time, vast networks of corrupt government officials permit the “slaughtering of tigers and other wild cats to supply the Asian trade in body parts.” Alexander couples this grim picture with enthusiastic accounts of the exotic birds and animals she has seen on her global travels, and the transitions can be jarring. She begins with a report on a 1982 trip to the still relatively undeveloped “birder’s paradise” of Belize, where, despite no sightings, she was thrilled to hear the “deep guttural cough” of a jaguar. The author also describes birding in Peru and recounts the experience of being greeted with a welcoming ceremony by New Guinean villagers in traditional costumes. While many readers will share the author’s concerns about conservation, Alexander provides few new insights into the people and places she has visited, and the narrative hops from place to place without enough connecting elements between the anecdotes.
A laudable effort that meets with mixed success.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-35436-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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
PERSPECTIVES
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