An engaging piece of nonfiction about one man’s prospecting adventures.
An introspective collection of journal entries from a traveler in the Alaskan Gold Rush.
George Cheever Hazelet was born in Senecaville, Ohio, in 1861, and when it was time for him to attend college, he, like many others at that time, migrated west, receiving his college degree in Iowa. He began a career as a schoolteacher, but eventually, he became the principal of his local school district. He was well on his way to becoming a town leader in Atkinson, Neb., but before the age of 40, he dedicated his life to a different venture: securing a fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush. Along with his partner, Andrew Jackson “Jack” Meals, a Nebraska farmer with no formal education, Hazelet traveled to Alaska in 1898 to attempt gold prospecting. This intriguing collection of journal entries includes small details that allow readers to get to know Hazelet more intimately: the type of dessert he’s eating on a particular night or how he’s noticed his face is puffier and older when he looks in the mirror. Editor/publisher Clark, Hazelet’s great-grandson, has successfully encapsulated his ancestor’s expedition in literary form. The entries engagingly reflect on the hardships of a life digging for gold: “The weather has been extremely cold the past few days / Am quite sure it must be down to forty degrees below zero / The water drove us out of the shaft and we are in hopes that these cold days will freeze it down.” Readers may find Hazelet’s journal to be captivating reading, as it promises more excitement at every turn. At one point, Hazelet provides a lucid description of encountering a glacier, and a sight of nature’s beauty and bounty that he’s never seen before. At another, he describes racing down the rapids in his boat at “breakneck” speed, waves crashing into his vessel.
An engaging piece of nonfiction about one man’s prospecting adventures.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2012
ISBN: 978-1938462009
Page Count: 277
Publisher: Old Stone Press
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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