Patterson’s voice is fresh, witty, and intelligent—and he could get by with a little less help from his friends.
A Canadian physician debuts with an emotional but sometimes pedantic memoir of his adventures traversing the Pacific in a 37-foot sailboat.
In August 1994, Patterson, “absorbed in self-pity” occasioned by an unhappy love affair, purchased a vessel called the Sea Mouse in British Columbia. Just 29 and recently discharged from the Canadian army, Patterson (who had no previous sailing experience) impulsively set sail for Tahiti—a longtime dream—in company with a onetime sheet-metal worker named Don (a more experienced sailor), whom he’d only recently met. In 18 swift chapters, Patterson tells of his preparations to sail, of his sometimes terrifying experiences on an unforgiving ocean, of his brief sojourns ashore in Hawaii, Palmyra, Penrhyn, and, finally, Tahiti. He then flies back to Canada to earn money to finance his return voyage. During this working hiatus, he impulsively (again!) invites three new acquaintances (one a lovely woman with whom he develops a tenuous romantic attachment) to go to Tahiti and sail back with him. These folks make it only as far as Hawaii, where they elect to fly home, and Patterson makes the final passage alone. His safe arrival ends his book. Patterson’s strong narrative is most effective in its self-deprecating accounts of his sometimes feckless, sometimes perilous efforts to learn how to sail while sailing. “I’m gonna be okay,” he tells himself, “look at all this lovely rope I have.” His flashbacks to his army service and to his medical experiences in remote Hudson Bay communities are also effective, often moving. His observations, however, sometimes border on the banal: out on the lonely open ocean, he writes, “our minds turned inward.” Sometimes deadly, too, are his long paraphrases of and quotations from works by other seafarers like Bruce Chatwin and Joshua Slocum.
Patterson’s voice is fresh, witty, and intelligent—and he could get by with a little less help from his friends.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-49883-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
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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