by J.R. Collier ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 20, 2008
More a harrowing memoir than a travelogue on the beauty of Africa.
A Canadian divorcee packs up her family and moves to Africa.
This autobiographical tale of life in Africa begins when the author (formerly known as J.R. Donnell) applies for a teaching job in one of the most stable African countries, Kenya, and arrives there in January 1972 with her four children: Jaden, 14, Scott, 12, Rick, 11 and her youngest Tina, eight. Bureaucratic problems begin at the Nairobi airport and continue when Donnell’s promised teaching job does not materialize. Her Kenyan friend from Canada, who helped her apply for the job, provides her with a house on his brother’s farm while she searches for work. The author’s landlord makes sexual advances, Jaden contracts malaria and their pets are killed off as the family struggles to adapt to the beautiful but harshly unfamiliar world in which they now live. Engrossing, though often repetitive, descriptions of their difficult and dangerous everyday lives keep the reader engaged as the Donnells fall in and out of trouble. The naïve author must fight off unwelcome sexual advances from those she thought were her friends, and the only person she trusts is Mark Kibira, a Kenyan with whom she’s having an affair. Mark is from a wealthy family and helps Jerry buy native products to export to her uncle in Canada, who in turn promises to sell them in his store. A series of rented houses provide a home for the family, but the children are only intermittently in school and often left to their own devices. While the author and Mark travel the country looking for items to export, Jaden narrowly escapes an attempted rape. Donnell accepts a marriage proposal from the often-unreliable Mark, and as her first year in Kenya draws to an end, the marriage is in trouble, her uncle is refusing to handle her first shipment of goods and Jaden, who has returned to Canada, is pregnant. Despite redundancies, the amusing and terrifying anecdotes in the book make for an absorbing story.
More a harrowing memoir than a travelogue on the beauty of Africa.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4196-8027-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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.
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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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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Pulitzer Prize Finalist
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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