A moving and bittersweet memoir of a woman’s love affair with a unique profession.
An intimate account of what it means to be a female wildland firefighter.
Essayist and novelist Emerick (The Geography of Water, 2015) dissects the passion that kept her on the fire line for more than 20 years. Just out of college in the mid-1980s, she traveled to Olympic National Park for a summer job. Insecure but seeking to break out of her shell, she accepted an assignment on the fire line during an especially nasty fire season. Though not convinced firefighting was the right path, Emerick imagined the new self that would result from the excitement and stress of the job: “The person I imagined I would become by fighting fire was someone better: tan, long-braided, self-sufficient, strong.” The author’s choice led to two decades of fighting fires in multiple states, all the while absorbing the incredible sights, smells, and sounds of fire. Emerick vividly recounts the extremely taxing physical requirements, the deadly conditions firefighters consistently endure, and the ever present lure of adventure and camaraderie each fire provides. The author explores the implications of working in a male-dominated field and how that environment has improved during her tenure. She also shares her knowledge of different species of trees and how each burns as well as the tools and equipment needed to fight fires. Crisscrossing the country with the seasons, the author fought fires in the Western U.S during the summer and worked winters in the Florida swamps. Emerick is candid about her work’s toll on unfulfilled romances and a broken marriage. After years as a firefighter, Emerick questions the environmental policy of snuffing out all fires and “whether all this firefighting was really good for the forest, if it might not better just to let it burn.”
A moving and bittersweet memoir of a woman’s love affair with a unique profession.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62872-843-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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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