A judicious, sensitive account of an Antarctic trial by ice.
To Roland Huntford’s The Last Place on Earth (1985) and Caroline Alexander’s The Endurance (1998), add this last stirring chapter in polar exploration’s Heroic Age.
In 1914, at the outset of WWI, Ernest Shackleton set out to make the first crossing of the Antarctic interior. He personally led the first prong of the expedition, attacking the continent from the Weddell Sea; the saga of how Shackleton led all his men to safety after his ship was crushed in the pack ice is perhaps the most stunning success story in the annals of survival. Tyler-Lewis (History/Cambridge) tells the lesser-known tale of the Trans-Antarctic Expedition’s second prong, the Ross Sea Party, which actually accomplished its mission: to lay a 360-mile lifeline of supply depots on the other side of the continent, intended to sustain Shackleton on the final quarter of his crossing. Due to horribly inadequate planning, meager financing and atrocious conditions, three men died, and a relief party was needed to rescue the rest. Because all their efforts proved ultimately futile, the Ross Sea Party’s story seems destined for eternal second billing to Shackleton’s spectacular failure. But Tyler-Lewis manages to spin a breathtaking yarn of survival and achievement under the most extreme conditions. Her adroit chronicle draws on a splendid assembly of raw materials: public records, private papers, journals, logs and letters. Insightful portraits of the leading actors explain how their individual strengths and weaknesses affected the fate of the expedition every bit as much as the unforgiving Antarctic environment. The survivors returned to a world transformed by the Great War. Gone, too, was the romance of polar exploration, killed by technological advances and the diminished appetite for pointless sacrifice. The expedition’s ethos seems distant now, though the last surviving member of the Ross Sea Party died in only 1978.
A judicious, sensitive account of an Antarctic trial by ice.Pub Date: April 24, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03412-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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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