An intelligent biography of a quixotic American who spent his life among the villagers and pygmies of the Ituri Forest in the Belgian Congo (now Zaire). Scion of a long line of Boston Brahmins, Patrick Tracy Lowell Putnam (19041953) first became attracted to Africa during his undergraduate days at Harvard; the spell lasted through 25 years, one world war, three American wives, and a handful of African ones. Heedless of the dangers posed by his adopted country, repeatedly bailed out by his father, Putnam was an odd combination of dilettante and expert. His knowledge of pygmy culture and lifestyle was encyclopedic, but he never managed to publish anything more substantial than a New Yorker article. After stints as an explorer and agent sanitaire for the Congo Red Cross, he settled on the Epulu River and established Camp Putnam with his first American wife. He imagined an African ``dude- plantation,'' where visitors could enjoy the luxuries of civilization while hunting, observing pygmy demonstrations, and photographing exotic wildlife in the middle of the jungle. Eventually the camp, including a medical clinic, became a small village of workers and two pygmy bands, a peculiar hybrid utopia under Putnam's benevolent dictatorship. His specialized knowledge was sought by many, but he never found the discipline to become a leader in his field. A degenerative lung disease tied him to a wheelchair, and in the last years of his life he became a frightening tyrant in his little kingdom. Mark (History of Anthropology/Peabody Museum, Harvard Univ.; A Stranger in Her Native Land, 1989) illuminates the bizarre life of a man whose career stretched from the days of gentleman ethnographers to the eve of independence in colonial Africa. One of those rare books that may send you to the library for more on the subject.
Pub Date: March 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-8032-3182-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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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