Perhaps the best reader for this book is someone who wants to hike that same trail and is willing to risk being talked out...
A writer, editor, and “inveterate walker” chronicles his monthlong hike in the Alps.
In his first book, Arlan follows the literary path that others have blazed, to great popular success, though he has taken a different route, both geographically and thematically. “Everyone back home knows the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, the John Muir Trail,” he writes. “But so few seem to have heard of the Grand Traverse of the Alps….There was something untouched about it that I liked, so I treated it preciously, like a secret.” This alone must have seemed like a good enough reason to undertake the trek and to write a book about it. However, there is little sense of true purpose in this account: no spiritual illumination, no sudden epiphanies, no meditative insight, no transformation—at least none that occurred during the hike or the writing about it. Toward the end, Arlan told a traveler, “I’ve been walking for over three weeks. Not every day, but almost. From Geneva.” When asked why, he responds, “The longer I walk the harder it is to answer the question.” Readers who have encountered such literary journeys will likely knows what happens: the author sacrifices some financial security; he encounters strangers, some of whom are kind; he gets lost; he is more tired than he has ever been; it rains a lot; he survives a dangerous fall. By the time he finished both his journey and his book, he changed a bit, discovering some stamina and inner resources he never knew he possessed. “I am a quitter by nature,” he insists, though the evidence suggests the contrary. “I don’t like pain the way some people do. I have no interest in ‘pushing myself,’ in ‘broadening my horizons’….The path of least resistance has always been my favorite path. So, again, I wonder: what was I doing here?”
Perhaps the best reader for this book is someone who wants to hike that same trail and is willing to risk being talked out of it.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5107-0975-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
