Highly readable, educational and entertaining.
A San Diego family’s adventure-filled, two-year journey from New York to the South Pacific in a 55-foot catamaran sailboat.
Along the way, the Silverwoods endured close encounters with modern-day pirates of the Caribbean, a Force-10 gale off Colombia, a broken generator in Tahiti and every kind of sea creature imaginable. In many ways, the children—Ben, 16, Amelia, 14, Jack, nine, and Camille, five—proved more resilient than their parents. John, an alcoholic, suffered several tumbles from the wagon early on, causing his admittedly high-strung wife Jean to nearly pack up the kids and leave. He soon righted himself, aided by some hastily arranged tropical AA meetings, and Jean was eventually calmed by daily runs on the beach and the companionship of a chance-met South African family making a similar round-the-world voyage. The Silverwoods’ courage and survival skills got their ultimate test when the Emerald Jane crashed into a hidden reef in the remote South Pacific, destroying the boat and severely damaging John’s leg. In this life-and-death trial, all of them were changed, brought together as few families ever are. The first-time authors prove able narrators and engaging hosts throughout this well-crafted memoir. Wisely, they focus not only on the natural wonders experienced on their marathon journey, but on the small everyday matters: meal preparations, the kids’ home schooling at sea, mechanical problems with the boat. These up-close, authentic details enrich a story that works on many levels—as intimate family portrait, colorful travelogue and high-seas drama. Moreover, the Silverwoods wrecked on the same reef where a three-masted sailing ship, the Julia Ann, was struck back in 1855, thus providing them with a riveting historical coda to their own adventure.
Highly readable, educational and entertaining.Pub Date: July 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6655-1
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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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