An informative, unusual, occasionally challenging, and generally amiable account by a physician and nature lover.
In this memoir, a doctor reflects on a life devoted to academic medicine and, later, to his passion for birding.
Born in upstate New York, Fitchen (Birding Portland and Multnomah County, 2014) discovered his love of nature early on. When he was 8 years old, his father, “a professor of fine arts and a scholar of Gothic architecture,” taught him the art of catching and collecting butterflies. That year, the author accompanied his parents on a tour of European Gothic cathedrals. His fascination with the beautiful glass mosaic windows remained with him when he observed an “erythroleukemic” bone marrow sample on a microscope slide during a medical school externship in Oregon: “Looking at the glorious images and resplendent colors was like beholding the stained glass at Chartres Cathedral—stained marrow/stained glass.” It was a professional turning point for him: He decided that he wanted to specialize in academic medicine. After his graduation from medical school, a stint in the Air Force as a flight surgeon, and a residency back in Oregon came a prestigious hematology/oncology fellowship at UCLA. In 1981, he returned to Oregon and joined the Veterans Administration. But before leaving California, he recorded the sighting of his first “life bird.” It would be decades before he could immerse himself in this second passion, with a trip to Attu on the farthest reaches of the Aleutian Islands, “the holy grail of North American birding.” Fitchen is a veteran writer—who has published articles in both medical and birding journals—and his memoir is articulate and detailed, filled with engaging personal anecdotes. But it is also encumbered by the author’s extensive use of professional jargon, although he does include parenthetical layperson’s explanations. Each chapter ends with a notation describing one of the birds he has added to his lifetime total. The final quarter of the book can serve as a useful primer for aspiring birders. And there is much to be learned here about the inner workings of academic medicine, including how Fitchen and his team acquired FDA approval for their breakthrough “oral fluid testing system” for HIV.
An informative, unusual, occasionally challenging, and generally amiable account by a physician and nature lover.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62901-601-6
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Inkwater Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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