In a 32-foot sloop named the Gypsy Moon, attorney Hurley sails solo from Annapolis to Nassau in this memoir.
After losing his job and going through a nasty divorce, Hurley finds himself in a gloomy mid-life crisis. He decides to fulfill one of his personal dreams—“to sail a small boat over the open ocean, bound for no destination but the horizon.” As he prepares for the journey, Hurley looks back at his life; he confesses his unfaithfulness to his wife and his subsequent feelings of regret and guilt. This retrospective interlude, along with others throughout the tale, deftly integrates the reader into the story, giving Hurley’s background in an intimate, confessional way, clarifying the author’s humanity. Like most people, he’s made mistakes and regrets some of his choices, yet he’s honest enough to share them, believing, or hoping, that his readers will sympathize. Once he sets forth, Hurley likens sailing to life, noting that no matter how well one plans ahead, unforeseen circumstances still occur; equipment fails, storms arise, uninformed choices are made and sometimes just plain old bad luck gets in the way. While he ruminates on life and sailing, Hurley throws in his thoughts on love, marriage and even religion. He describes his foray into online dating and his personal beliefs about God and the afterlife. His philosophy about successful marriages—that they focus on the husband and wife and not the children—flies in the face of the contemporary world’s viewpoint, a viewpoint that, according to Hurley, explains many of society’s current neuroses. Hurley’s philosophical ruminations strike a chord because of a common peculiarity—faith. Hurley has faith in someone bigger than himself, someone vaster than the ocean. As his voyage proceeds, Hurley grounds his boat, battles 10-foot waves and struggles against powerful ocean currents. Fear is his constant companion, yet he conquers his fear, coming out stronger than he was. Not only does he rediscover his zest for life, he finds happiness with a woman named Susan, who lives in North Carolina. Hurley’s prose nicely fits his subject matter; his story is poignant without being maudlin and spiritual without being sanctimonious. Imagine a nautical, male version of Annie Dillard amalgamated with Kathleen Norris, who, discerning the sacred in the mundane, explains it in such a way that his readers feel blessed, too. A striking memoir of personal discovery.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0976127512
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ragbagger Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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