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IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF GENGHIS KHAN

A low-key memoir of a thousand-mile camel trek across the Gobi desert in pre-WW II China, tracing not too diligently the steps of Genghis Khan—and complementing Tim Severin's In Search of Genghis Khan (1992). Just out of Yale at the height of the Depression, DeFrancis (Chinese/University of Hawaii; Visible Speech, 1989, etc.—not reviewed) went to Beijing to learn Chinese in order to get a job with Standard Oil (only belatedly did he discover that Standard Oil did its hiring in New York). The project suggested to DeFrancis in China by Canadian Desmond Martin (a Genghis Khan enthusiast and this book's photographer) was to be only a summer adventure, but the experience and the author's growing interest in the Chinese language were to determine his subsequent career. In a pace as leisurely as that of the camels he and Martin rode, DeFrancis describes with beguiling candor a journey that began at Guihua, where the travelers bought camels; continued north to the Temple of the Larks, gateway to territory ruled by the Mongols; crossed a thousand miles of the Gobi (``Gobi,'' DeFrancis tells us, means ``gravel'') to Suzhou; went down the old Silk Road to Lanzhou, where, to escape escalating tensions between Communists and local warlords, the pair took a raft down the Yellow River to Baotou; and returned by train to Beijing. Along the way, DeFrancis and Martin coped with recalcitrant camels; lived on tea and millet; endured temperatures of up to 140 degrees; visited Etsina, now an abandoned city, which Genghis Khan conquered and Marco Polo admired; saw the southern end of the Great Wall; and observed the death throes of old China as Communists, Japanese, and local warlords vied for control of these sparsely populated and inhospitable regions. As much a gently humorous jaunt as a keenly observed portrait of a place and people about to be devastated by war. (Seventy-eight illustrations, seven maps)

Pub Date: June 30, 1993

ISBN: 0-8248-1493-2

Page Count: 296

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990). 

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-679-42850-X

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Villard

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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