A terrifically accessible account of this wide-eyed, extraordinarily intrepid adventurer’s thrilling and chilling exploits.
Pertinent new insights into the life and Arctic treks of an important 19th-century American explorer.
Having stumbled upon the logbook and other effects of Elisha Kent Kane (1820–57), Canadian author McGoogan (Ancient Mariner, 2004, etc.) sets out to rehabilitate this previously neglected figure. Going in search of English adventurer Sir John Franklin, who disappeared in 1845 while looking for the Northwest Passage, Kane discovered instead the Great Glacier of Humboldt and the Kennedy Channel; he also recorded many valuable observations of polar geography, wildlife and Inuit culture. Scion of a prominent Philadelphia family, he determined to make a glorious reputation for himself and was undeterred by several severe bouts of rheumatic fever in his late teens. He studied medicine and took to the sea, serving on vessels to the Far East, Egypt and Africa. At the instigation of Franklin’s wife, lobbying tirelessly to generate a search expedition for her husband, Kane made two trips to the Arctic in search of Sir John and the legendary Open Polar Sea, which was supposed to flow across the pole. The first, as ship’s surgeon on the Advance in 1850, resulted in the discovery of the Beechey Island graves of three men from Franklin’s expedition. A monumental second voyage commanded by Kane lasted for two brutal years, 1853-5, as he and his increasingly mutinous crew tried to drive upward through Baffin Bay and Smith Sound. They reached farther north than any other explorers had and produced sketches of the fantastic landscape, but the scurvy-ridden and starving men survived a second winter only with the help of Inuit tribes. Returning as a hero, still courting the controversial spiritualist Maggie Fox, Kane managed to produce his rapturous Arctic Explorations before dying of a stroke at age 37.
A terrifically accessible account of this wide-eyed, extraordinarily intrepid adventurer’s thrilling and chilling exploits.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58243-440-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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