Although the narrative occasionally veers off course, horse lovers will adore this inspiring and spirited memoir.
A young Englishwoman takes on the world’s longest and most difficult horse race.
In 2013, Prior-Palmer came across a photograph of the Mongol Derby: “long-maned ponies streaming over green steppes, space poured wild and free—in Mongolia.” The deadline was fast approaching, and the race’s organizer gave her a discount to help defray the costly entry fee. The Derby, a “truly peculiar invention,” is a seven-day, 1,000-kilometer race on 25 wild Mongolian ponies, descendants, writes the author, of “Genghis Khan’s famed Takhi horses, the ones that shouldered his empire’s postal system from the thirteenth century onwards.” Every 40 kilometers, at stations called urtuus, tired horses are replaced with new ones; riders rest, eat, and use the toilets (holes in the ground). Each of the competitors has a rough map of the course, a not-always-reliable GPS device, and “nylon endurance saddles.” In this feisty and exhilarating debut memoir, Prior-Palmer smoothly recounts what happened over her momentous week in August. Right at the start, she fell behind: “Where to go? I was hoping to follow someone….I can see only sun.” Over the next seven days, she fought aching bruises, torrential rain, brutal heat, and a rough fall. She continuously scoured the vast horizon for “hamster cities,” the holes of which could seriously injure a horse, and she dodged herds of nibbling goats while the horses dealt with Mongolian families’ nipping dogs. The author personalizes the horses with names: Brolly, Dunwoody and “7.” As she raced, carrying a copy of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, she channeled her Aunt Lucinda, “my go-to ahead of any equestrian event,” to help her get through each arduous day. After the apparent winner was penalized for overheating her horse, the author, who was second, was declared the winner—the youngest ever and the first woman.
Although the narrative occasionally veers off course, horse lovers will adore this inspiring and spirited memoir.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948226-19-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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