Powerful reading for the quadricentennial of Hudson’s legendary voyage.
An unexpected portrayal of America in the decline of industry, delivered from the unique vantage point of the Hudson River.
Fireboat engineer and journalist DuLong first laid eyes on the Hudson through the windows of the Empire State Building while working at her cushy dot-com job. After volunteering aboard the John J. Harvey in 2001, she entered into an intoxicating love affair with workboats, industry and labor that would drastically change her life. Her fascination with the fireboat’s history escalated into an obsession with the Hudson River, whose industries were a significant factor in the early development of America. After getting laid off from her job, DuLong gave her life to physical work on the water, and over time she became one of the only female fireboat engineers in the world. As her personal adventure on the Hudson unfolds, she paints an eye-opening picture of what America has been—a country of bootstrap entrepreneurs and hands-on laborers—and what it is becoming, awash in the decay of industry, a faltering economy and the regression of human innovation. Through stories of those who still toil with their hands and who preserve and share the past, the author illustrates how a nation always on the cutting edge of technology may actually be moving backward, losing the facilities and knowledge to produce everyday goods and increasingly relying on foreign exports.
Powerful reading for the quadricentennial of Hudson’s legendary voyage.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8698-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
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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