Tugboats aren’t renowned for their balletic qualities, but Krieger finds in them a beautiful, intrepid choreography.
Apparent negligence and a ferocious hurricane spell mortal trouble for hundreds of men on an oil barge in this feverish tale of rescue from Krieger (Conversations with Cannibals, not reviewed).
In 1995, 60 miles off the coast of the Yucatán, a barge was laying oil pipeline. The craft, a colossal structure 400 feet long by 100 feet wide, carried 245 men and was maneuvered by a pair of ocean-going tugs. The manager of the vessel decided to ride out a hurricane at sea. Krieger delicately suggests that this decision may have been motivated by penalties imposed for running over schedule and may not have been the wisest choice, considering that the barge was not exactly shipshape, being both rusty and leaky. But responsibility is not Krieger’s main concern here; rather, he is intent on delivering a rousing story, directing the narrative like an old-fashioned melodrama: You know the hurricane is going to be trouble, just like the damsel tied to the tracks knows her goose is cooked when she hears the locomotive’s whistle. The first encounter with the storm batters the barge and tugs, though not critically. Then the hurricane turns on its heels to pound them again. This time the 40-foot seas sink the barge and all the men go into the drink. Keeping the story just this side of breathless, Krieger describes what it was like to be in the rough sea, waves crashing on the barge workers, and how preposterously valiant were the efforts of the tugs—one more soon arrived on the scene—to find the men and pull them aboard in the middle of the night and the middle of a hurricane, the boats pitching like toys, the nine-foot propellers slicing the air with each crest. Incredibly, only eight men died. Litigation regarding the culpability of the barge’s owner continues to this day.
Tugboats aren’t renowned for their balletic qualities, but Krieger finds in them a beautiful, intrepid choreography.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-2708-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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