The author’s knowledge of aviation history renders this a proficient chronicle of women in flight.
Brisk life of the famed aviator who is more often taken to task for her sloppy technique than lauded for her bravery.
Pilot and aviation historian Winters (Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 2006, etc.) succinctly lays out the facts of Amelia Earhart’s remarkable story from “a pilot’s perspective,” underscoring how Earhart tended to skimp on the details of preparation for her difficult flights—e.g., on her last fatal flight around the world, she had not mastered the radio technology and resisted learning Morse code, which would have allowed the ship circling Howland Island in the Pacific to find her. Moreover, her handler turned husband George P. Putnam fashioned publicity events that forced her to adhere to unsound deadlines. Clues to Earhart’s personality emerge from her peripatetic upbringing, especially in terms of her disintegrating family due to her father’s drinking and loss of employment as a railroad lawyer. Her father’s devil-may-care attitude and her mother’s free spending fueled Earhart’s delight in adventure and risk-taking. She was a tomboy, athlete and feminist, her Midwestern edges polished at a Philadelphia finishing school and later at Columbia University, but she restlessly worked many jobs to pay for her initial flying lessons. Her life-changing opportunity came with a call from former Army Air Corps pilot Hilton H. Railey in April 1928; he and promoter Putnam were seeking a replacement pilot for a transatlantic flight (with a male flight crew) and were impressed by Earhart’s Lindy-like looks and poise. Criticism that she flew on the Friendship merely as “sheep in the cabin” prodded her to plan her own stunts, and by May 1931 she had made the solo transatlantic flight that established her reputation. In addition to examining Earhart, Winters includes the achievements of lesser-known women pilots such as Ruth Nichols.
The author’s knowledge of aviation history renders this a proficient chronicle of women in flight.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-230-61669-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
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