A bright, uplifting biography about determination and giving back.
The inspiring life of a Ugandan middle-distance runner and his journey from bush village to Olympic hopeful.
Julius Achon was born during Idi Amin’s terrifying reign. A firstborn son who barely survived a potentially fatal measles outbreak, he became charged with the care of his siblings after being frequently abandoned by his herdsman father, who spent the family’s meager income on alcohol and gambling. At age 12, Achon was captured by the Lord’s Resistance Army and physically and mentally primed for combat. His already “sinuous, efficient, straight-backed stride” and fierce running speed allowed him to escape during an ambush attack and return home. In this segment, sports journalist Brant (Duel in the Sun: Alberto Salazar, Dick Beardsley, and America’s Greatest Marathon, 2006) demonstrates his flair for building suspense. Achon’s father advised him to learn to run and “become like John Akii-Bua,” who won the gold medal in the 400-meter hurdles at the 1972 Olympics. Empowered and increasingly fearless, the young man trained relentlessly and began advancing in contests within larger arenas and eventually paid for boarding school. In the mid-1990s, having relocated to America, Achon swiftly ascended the competitive ranks in more challenging races. While attending George Mason University, his coach cautioned him not to become preoccupied with the “African witch-doctor tribal stuff, all this rebel civil war junk” in his past. Professional racing beckoned, as did Olympic trials, but after a bittersweet reunion back in Uganda, a return to the States was dampened by the news of his mother’s violent death at the hands of the LRA. Achon refocused himself with more philanthropic endeavors, including a children’s fund financed by a businessman eager to construct an ultramodern medical facility back in Uganda. With breezy, accessible prose, Brant’s profile incorporates African history and insider details on the physical demands of race-running, strategies for success, and how Achon personally paved the way for others like him to succeed with pride and humanitarianism both on the track and in everyday life.
A bright, uplifting biography about determination and giving back.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-39215-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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
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