A precise account of what happens aboard a swordfishing boat on the Grand Banks when it is not being terrorized by a perfect storm, from a captain among the fleet. It was Greenlaw’s sister ship, Andrea Gail, that went down in the Halloween storm of 1991, a tragedy recounted by Sebastian Junger in his bestselling book. Here it is Greenlaw’s intention to tell the story of a more typical swordfishing trip, how she manages the boat, crew, and fishing during the month they will be together at sea pulling a 40-mile longline. And she does tease from the everyday a fixating description of the fisherman’s (“fisherwoman . . . I hate the term”) shipboard day, preparing for and pulling in the harvest, contending with that temperamental nuisance known as the weather, judging bait or her boss (“very pushy and never satisfied”); she makes clear the importance of a good cook: “times of bad food were also periods of serious crew problems.” Then there is the simple nature of the work, the hundreds of hours of arduous physical labor squeezed in a few weeks, under brutal conditions, that you might not get paid for. Greenlaw comes across as a savvy captain with a knack for knowing the mood of both her crew and the weather (and no shrinking violet: “The meek may inherit the Earth, but they’ll never get my piece of the ocean”). Yet there is a spit and polish to her writing that feels distant from the subject, not so much overwritten as manufactured. There is a noticeable lack of sting and fear when things go wrong. Absent as well are doubts or confusions Greenlaw might have understandably entertained about this or that, which undercuts any rawness or immediacy demanded by the retelling of events. Still, this is a welcome flip side to the multitude of hellzapoppin’ peril-at-sea stories, a world apart in its rhythms but often as not just as riveting. (photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 12, 1999
ISBN: 0-7868-6451-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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