An absorbing account of courage, ambition, and early success—followed by a swift decline into desperation and tragedy.
A moving pop biography of the first man to swim the English Channel, by former BBC radio producer Watson.
At 26, Captain Matthew Webb (1848–83) achieved what had been thought to be impossible. His 21-hour swim across the English Channel instantly earned him the status of a national hero, hailed by the press as “half man half fish.” Dazzled by his newfound celebrity, Webb resigned his commission with the Merchant Navy (where he had served with distinction since he was 12) and tried to earn his living as a professional swimmer. The monotonous spectacle of long-distance swimming, however, would not draw a crowd for long. His ensuing challenges—which he claimed were in the interest of advancing the sport of swimming—never matched the popularity of his channel crossing and became increasingly humiliating as Webb sought in vain to outdo himself. In America, he lost a race to his archrival Paul Boyton, who had crossed the channel two months before him in a bizarre life-preserving suit that allowed its wearer to fire warning flares and smoke cigars while rowing to safety. Eventually Webb returned to England, dropped the pretense of advancing the sport, and freely admitted that he was swimming only for money. His later feats (such as a river race in near-freezing water and a 60-hour swim in an aquarium) came to resemble freak shows, and they drew few spectators and little money. Webb reached the sad culmination of his career in the Niagara River, where he died during an insane attempt to swim the rapids above the falls. He left a wife and child behind.
An absorbing account of courage, ambition, and early success—followed by a swift decline into desperation and tragedy.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2001
ISBN: 1-58542-109-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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
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