Manages to pump new life into some well-documented tales.
A thorough, mostly partisan analysis of the great explorer’s life and work.
In ex-Navyman Rose’s second book on Byrd (the first, Assault on Eternity: Richard E. Byrd and the Exploration of Antarctica 1946–47, was published in 1980), the author attempts to both document Byrd’s life and deal with many of the criticisms directed at him. Rose (Power at Sea: The Breaking Storm, 1919–1945, 2006, etc.) begins by sketching Byrd’s adolescence. These passages contain a prescient example of a criticism that would continue to dog the explorer throughout his life—his capacity to exaggerate the truth when recalling his journeys—as Rose drags some truth out of the contradictions surrounding the tale of Byrd traveling across the globe alone at the tender age of 11. The bulk of the book is comprised of Byrd’s epic adventures. Details surrounding his controversial flight over the North Pole in 1926 (for which he earned the Medal of Honor) are among the most interesting, with Rose delivering a compelling case against the critics who scorned Byrd’s claims to have made this audacious trip. Byrd’s trans-Atlantic journey in 1927 also garners close attention, but it’s the thrilling recollections of his trips to Antarctica, many of which are based on the intrepid explorer’s own words, that really impress. Of particular interest is the five-month period in 1934 that Byrd spent in isolation manning a meteorological station, barely escaping with his life after suffering carbon-monoxide poisoning. Rose effectively captures the brutal conditions and the deterioration in his mental and physical health during this period, as he goes from writing eloquently about the aurora australis to barely recognizing himself as he looked in the mirror. The author makes no attempt to mask the rampant egotism and often impenetrably stubborn nature of his subject, but he generally expresses a clear affection for him throughout.
Manages to pump new life into some well-documented tales.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8262-1782-0
Page Count: 540
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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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