Geographers and American history buffs will enjoy Fenster’s detailed research on these fascinating men, her easy style of...
The United States purchased the Louisiana Territory for $15 million but did not know its borders. Fenster (FDR's Shadow: Louis Howe, The Force that Shaped Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, 2009, etc.) ably depicts the men who set out to discover them.
We all know about Lewis and Clark, but there were other parties seeking the territory’s boundaries. The author narrates the wonderful and twisted story of how Napoleon’s France acquired the territory from Spain and then sold it a year later to America, while Spain did their best to block exploration. The threat of war with Spain was a constant, with explorers on alert. Thomas Jefferson sought men who would make a geographic record, interact and seek peace with Native Americans, and survey sites for forts. Most importantly, they were to conduct experiments to establish longitude and latitude, describe the land, and collect mineral, vegetable, and animal specimens. “Jefferson had in mind a very special combination of characteristics when he chose his explorers,” writes the author. Andrew Ellicott and Thomas Freeman were appointed to survey the 31st parallel boundary between the Floridas and the Mississippi territory, working in cooperation with William Dunbar, a brilliant but difficult polymath. The self-serving Gen. James Wilkinson, a subject worth a book on his own, often got in the way and collected salary from Spain and America. In spite of Wilkinson, however, the 31st parallel project was completed. Lewis and Clark’s Missouri River expedition may have been the longest, but equally important were Dunbar and chemist George Hunter’s work on the Ouachita River as well as Zebulon Pike’s discovery of the source of the Mississippi and his attempts to link up with Freeman’s Red River expedition.
Geographers and American history buffs will enjoy Fenster’s detailed research on these fascinating men, her easy style of writing, and tales beyond the textbooks. She opens an entirely new vista on those who opened the West.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-307-95648-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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