Filled with a sumptuous cast of real-life adventurers, this is an engrossing and stirring tale.
The biography of a man who “competed for the last great prize in polar exploration.”
Readers who grew up devouring the Tom Swift adventure novels, with their flying boats and subocean geotrons, will find much to like in Maynard’s (The Unseen Anzac: How an Enigmatic Explorer Created Australia’s World War I Photographs, 2015, etc.) engrossing biography of Lincoln Ellsworth (1880-1951). He was something of a “mystery” to the author until he came upon a cache of Ellsworth’s papers, which “opened an intimate window into one of the strangest episodes in polar history.” The son of a domineering, ultrawealthy coal baron, Ellsworth was an insecure man in search of a purpose. A college dropout, he had the money to do whatever he wanted, so he became a professional adventurer. He prospected for gold and participated in a buffalo hunt (which he wrote a book about) and a geological survey in Peru. His life changed in 1924 when he met Roald Amundsen, the “world’s greatest polar explorer.” Ellsworth’s father provided the financing for the two of them to explore the Arctic by air, but the expedition failed. After Ellsworth’s father died, he inherited millions. He financed Amundsen’s semirigid airship expedition to be the first to reach the North Pole by air. But Richard Byrd did it first, although, as Maynard notes, he actually came up short. Ellsworth then financed explorer Hubert Wilkins’ expedition to travel in a submarine to the North Pole. It failed. After a series of harrowing, unsuccessful Arctic expeditions by air, finally, in 1935, using a reconditioned herring boat which Ellsworth named after one of his heroes, Wyatt Earp, and a specially modified airplane he named Polar Star, Ellsworth and his pilot were the first to cross Antarctica. “By guess or by God,” Maynard writes, it “remains an incredible achievement.”
Filled with a sumptuous cast of real-life adventurers, this is an engrossing and stirring tale.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-012-5
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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
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