A fine biography of a significant environmental champion.
A biography of a 19th-century naturalist who worked tirelessly on behalf of America’s wilderness and Native American rights.
Beginning in 1870, with his first trip west, George Bird Grinnell (1849-1938) evolved into one of the most prominent conservationists in America, a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and many native tribal leaders. He campaigned to establish national parks, the Audubon Society, and the New York Zoological Society; edited the long-running journal Forest and Stream; founded the Boone and Crockett Club, whose mission it was to preserve large game; and published many ethnographies of Plains tribes. Drawing on 40,000 pages of correspondence, 50 diaries and notebooks, and an unfinished autobiography, Taliaferro (All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay, from Lincoln to Roosevelt, 2013, etc.) thoroughly—and with due admiration—documents the life of “a man of worthy causes.” He acknowledges, however, the limitations of his sources: “Possibly Grinnell was simply too busy and proper to indulge in self-reflection. Or was there something he wanted to avoid reflecting upon?” Although the author hints at “secrets,” he reveals little about Grinnell’s intimate relationships with friends and family, including his wife, whom he suddenly married in 1902. A photographer, she energetically accompanied him on his trips west, where he exulted in freedom from the commercial world of New York and experienced the “magnificent drama” of events such as the Pawnee buffalo hunt: “the most momentous, the most defining experience” of Grinnell’s life. “There is something rather horrible in the wild and savage excitement that one feels under such circumstances,” he said of another hunt. Taliaferro portrays Grinnell evenhandedly as a man of his time: Seeing the oppression suffered by Native Americans, Grinnell urged recognition that they “are humans like ourselves”; still, he “hewed to the prevailing anthropological wisdom that Indians were only midway up the ladder from savagery to civilization.” Grinnell’s life, Taliaferro aptly concludes, “was a study in romanticism, evolution, and progressivism.”
A fine biography of a significant environmental champion.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-013-2
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
PROFILES
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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