A breath of fresh air. (8-page photo insert, not seen)
Freelance writer Winters engagingly narrates her trek along most of the Appalachian Trail, from its start in Georgia to its end in Maine.
The Appalachian Trail, or AT, served as a rite of passage for the author, who left a series of dead-end jobs and ended a disastrous relationship before beginning her journey at the summit of Springer Mountain, Georgia. (The eight-mile path leading to the trailhead is so steep that some hikers have given up before reaching the actual AT.) The author—trail name Amazin’ Grace—spent six months hiking the AT’s 2,000 miles, along which she became part of a community of travelers with monikers like Dances With Mice, Bearbait, Maine Event, and G.R. Dia. Braced for a grueling pilgrimage, Winters was unprepared for the social side of trail life. Although she usually walked alone during the day, her nights were spent with assorted hikers at mice- and skunk-infested shelters. The majesty of nature and the easygoing support of other “thruhikers” helped ease Winters’s initial loneliness and enabled her to forge a new relationship, this time with someone she met on the trail. The author includes myriad observations of AT culture and etiquette. Some hikers are purists walking only on the “official” white-blazed AT. Others occasionally hike trails marked with blue blazes; these are older sections of the AT, or trails that intersect with roads leading toward much-needed supplies. “Yellow-blazing” is hitchhiking, “green-blazing” is not following a trail at all, and “ghost-blazing” is daring to venture where original white AT markers have been painted out or faded. The Trail itself? As one short-timer put it: “Let’s see . . . up and down, up and down, up and down. Followed by down and up.”
A breath of fresh air. (8-page photo insert, not seen)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55583-658-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Alyson
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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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