Alaska: where the whites live out their dreams or go bonkers, and the Natives sport attachÉ cases or swig straight from the bottle. McGinniss (The Selling of the President, Heroes) set out in late November, when the people who rode the ferry from Seattle "were going to Alaska for a reason." Starting with his cabin-mate, he learns their reasons. "The high state official" found himself in Fairbanks in 1949, after a tearing drunk, with only $1.70 in his pocket: "There still was an American frontier, and he had happened to stumble across it." To him, the frontier vanished with the pipeline. And McGinniss' old friend, who left a Massachusetts newspaper job in 1967 "in search of freedom and adventure," is now Atlantic Richfield's resident director of public relations. But the passing of the "real Alaska" hasn't yet closed the door to freedom or opportunity: in shabby, dreary Bethel, a young Eskimo woman and her three San Francisco hippie friends quickly became the town's librarian, museum curator, disk jockey, press photographer: the cultural powers-that-be. "If you've got any talent at all," says one, "you can use it to an unlimited extent." Still, they too are worried, McGinniss finds, by the pace of development. He makes other sorties: to Barrow, where the Eskimos, newly enriched by the Native Claims Act, send their basketball team to Hawaii to compete (along with "a dozen cheerleaders and thirty or forty students to do the cheering") and the white superintendent of schools doesn't dare rebuke them; to a Russian Orthodox Christmas festival—a week-long orgy of candy-eating—in a squalid Eskimo village; and to more conventional Alaska sites—the oilfields, a cabin back of beyond, a Senate hearing on preservation of the wilderness. In a sense his unstructured, non-sequential narrative is like a quick-cut trailer for a film that never gets underway; but if we're denied commanding thoughts, we're also spared pat generalizations. Instead: "The way you could tell a real Alaskan," one of his contacts comments, "was by how many marriages he had survived." And at the close, when McGinniss has a double-barreled "wilderness adventure"—he's threatened by grizzlies and comes upon a hidden, Shangri-La valley—there's reason to be grateful for the looseness, the come-what-mayness of the rest of the book. The raw, tacky, raucous human scene, and the isolation and cold, are subject enough. Engrossing reading and an addition to the basic Alaska shelf.
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1980
ISBN: 1935347039
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1980
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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