More memoir and less Alaska adventure than the subtitle suggests, but still an enjoyable, heartfelt narrative.
In the wake of divorce, Ureneck (Journalism/Boston Univ.) tries to reconcile with his college-bound son and his own past during a ten-day fishing trip in the Alaska wilderness.
The author and son Adam glided down the salmon-rich Kanektok River aboard a rented rubber raft in late August 2000, but most of this thoughtful, engaging memoir actually unfolds in central New Jersey and Maine. Ureneck recalls a lonely nomadic childhood in sleepy Garden State towns like Spotswood and New Brunswick, raised by his fiercely loving Greek mother and disappointed by two different fathers, both ruined by drink. His second father, a hard-living merchant-marine sailor named John Kababick, helped foster his love of fishing but also did things like lose four months’ pay in one day at Monmouth Racetrack. Kababick eventually disappeared just as the author’s biological father had. When Ureneck’s own marriage began to dissolve years later in the Maine woods, he hoped to minimize Adam’s anger and resentment by taking a long-promised fishing trip to Alaska. The strategy proved only marginally successful. His sullen, precocious son clearly resented the breakup of the family, and if Ureneck ever attempted to explain his reasons to Adam, he doesn’t provide that crucial conversation here. Nor do we ever get the boy’s reaction to Dad’s new girlfriend, a New York Times reporter he met while on sabbatical from his job as a Maine newspaper editor. When not dwelling too obsessively on his unraveled marriage, however, Ureneck generally proves an intelligent tour guide, offering lovely descriptions of the morning mist shrouding a wilderness river, or the glare of a mother bear when she and a cub are startled by an approaching river raft.
More memoir and less Alaska adventure than the subtitle suggests, but still an enjoyable, heartfelt narrative.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-37151-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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