Historian Enright (America’s Natural Places: Rocky Mountains and Great Plains, 2009, etc.) showcases the careers of Osa and Martin Johnson, explorers, wildlife-movie pioneers and inseparable adventure seekers.
At the age of 16, Osa walked out of the 1909 popular lecture and photo display put on by Martin Johnson in Chanute, Kan., after his return from the South Seas. She thought the show was ugly and repulsive, but the two hit it off and, within a month, they had married. On Osa’s initiative, they took the lecture on the vaudeville circuit to raise money for joint explorations in the South Seas. She never lost this ability to act decisively, which many times saved her husband’s life. Sharing their lives, they revisited the South Seas, and then followed up with three visits to Kenya before returning to the South Seas again. Except for an Explorers’ Club membership, which Osa, as a woman, could never attain, the two were inseparable until Martin’s tragic death in a plane crash in 1937. During their adventures, Osa and Martin pioneered using movie to record wildlife in their natural habitat, and their films remain a source of documentation for studies of wildlife today. The couple traveled and filmed in a time of transition, while the British were establishing preserves like Serengeti and ruthlessly clearing wildlife from areas designated for settled agriculture. Osa continued after Martin’s death, writing books for adults and children, and her groundbreaking TV series Big Game Hunt. The couple’s delight and happiness in living the life they made for each other shines through.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7627-6360-3
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
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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