Vivid details and intelligent insights invigorate this celebration of the human spirit at work in unfamiliar places.
From the author/editor of several books about commercial fishing (Out on the Deep Blue, 2001, etc.), a more personal work chronicling her 23 summers spent pulling salmon from Alaskan waters.
Fields (English/Univ. of Alaska, Kodiak) balances the gritty details of this rigorous endeavor—check out the superb analysis of why a person’s hands are the precision tools of fishing—with an affirmation of life lessons learned along the way. Raised in New England, she attended college in Ohio, where she met husband Duncan, a native Alaskan from a fishing family. They were drawn together, she writes, “by a mutual love of philosophy and theology,” and this shared interest makes her memoir as much a chronicle of spiritual journey as a recollection of her life in fishing. Recollections of an impoverished childhood—she was one of six children abandoned by their father, who helped their mother restore old houses—alternate with accounts of her adult life. Fields describes the fishing seasons she worked, beginning as a newlywed in 1978, as well as journeys to Asia and to Africa made before she settled down to raise two children. Though strong, she found fishing daunting: the hours were long; the weather capricious; and the way of life tougher than she’d anticipated. (Scarce water supplies, for example, turned bathing and laundry into major chores.) She was close to Duncan’s family, but as the years passed she found the fishing season straining her marriage: there was no time to talk to her husband; and after the children were born, she feared medical emergencies (travel between their island and Kodiak, where the nearest doctors were, was always dangerous). But faith and her realization that life on the island was part of “the grace that sustains” have reconciled her to a choice she made all but unknowingly at age 20.
Vivid details and intelligent insights invigorate this celebration of the human spirit at work in unfamiliar places.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-29140-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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