A tribute to the spirit of adventure, akin to Robin Lee Graham’s Dove.
The rousing account of a 17-year-old Australian’s solo, nonstop sail around the world in his yacht, the Lionheart, published to coincide with the airing of a National Geographic special about the journey.
After 11 months at sea and nearly 27,000 nautical miles, Jesse Martin became the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe. When he set sail in late 1998, the voyage “was the culmination of years of dreaming.” Reared in the Daintree rainforest, Martin had a colorful childhood. At age 11, he was backpacking through Southeast Asia with his mother and his brother Beau; by 14, Jesse had already completed a three-month sailing trip from Melbourne to Cape York with Beau and their father. One year later, Jesse and Beau kayaked in Papua New Guinea and wrote an article about their experiences for Australian Geographic. When Martin decided to sail around the world, he notes, “I started from scratch, with no boat, no equipment, little training, and even less experience.” To support the endeavor, he approached Australian Geographic and a host of other potential sponsors. Something about the teen inspired confidence, and many companies signed on. In order to attain the record of an unassisted solo journey, Martin could not take supplies on board during his journey, although he was allowed to hand off garbage and at the halfway point to take on mail, which had to be inspected by an official to verify that it contained nothing that could assist him. The rapid narrative is peppered with Martin’s journal entries, which reveal the remarkable teen’s complexity. One part extremely competent sailor, he repairs a damaged furler and fixes the wind generator after a bird crashes into the blades. And one part forgetful teen, he neglects to pack a comb and for the next 11 months must use a fork to groom his hair.
A tribute to the spirit of adventure, akin to Robin Lee Graham’s Dove.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-86508-347-X
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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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