Its release so soon after the widely publicized Pennsylvania mining disaster and rescue should boost the book commercially,...
A strikingly told story of a Canadian mining catastrophe.
In 1958, in the prettily named Springhill, Nova Scotia, a rush of subterranean energy compressed the deep chambers of the town's coal mine, thrusting the floors of the tunnels against their roofs. Two-and-a-half miles underground, dozens of men were trapped in small pockets of space soon to be in utter darkness, the maze of tunnels crushed about them, gas seeping here and there. Through interviews with survivors, the autobiography of the local doctor, and, most fascinatingly, a study of survival strategies conducted after the disaster, the award-winning Greene (Praying for Sheetrock, 1991, etc.) recreates the extraordinary efforts undertaken by those trapped and those on top to keep themselves from flying apart under the circumstances. She tracks in excruciating detail the actions of two groups of men—seven in one, twelve in another—as they tended the injured, scrounged for food, devised ways to make contact, considered whether or not to cut off one man's arm that had been pinned inside a wall of fallen coal, forcing him into a standing slouch. The last of those men were finally freed nine days later, though 76 others died. In the still-segregated state of Georgia, authorities were unpleasantly surprised to find a black miner in a group they opportunistically invited down for a celebratory vacation; he was also shunned by some for breaking the miners’ code when he allowed himself to be singled out as Canadian Man of the Year. Greene concludes with a portrait of the ghastly emotional consequences of the ordeal that did not disappear in the light of day. Some of her miner profiles are better than others, and a few are obviously patched together from too-scant material, but she captures the gloom in all its manifestations.
Its release so soon after the widely publicized Pennsylvania mining disaster and rescue should boost the book commercially, but this sensitive account stands on its own artistic merits. (8 b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-15-100559-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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