More somber than funny but an eye-opening look at a place that doesn’t figure on most travelers’ bucket lists.
The peripatetic Briton journeys behind the most unyielding of iron curtains.
“The only advice which really saddens me is the one which seems to strike at the very essence of traveling,” writes Palin (Erebus: The Story of a Ship, 2018, etc.)—namely, the warning that a foreigner in North Korea shouldn’t try to mix with the ordinary people. That, of course, is the author’s stock in trade, and it surprised him and his crew to find that in many instances, their North Korean handlers, true believers though they may have been, accommodated them in such matters as taking meals in ordinary restaurants filled with working-class (and highly bibulous) citizens. Palin’s travelogue contains much that is expected, though with his lightly learned way of putting things, as when he writes of crossing the border from China over the Yalu River: "A socialist market economy slips away and a largely unreformed command economy starts to emerge between the flashing black beams of the bridge.” His travels included a brief visit to the sacred highest peak in the land, the vision of which was marred by a vast statue to an earlier dictator in the Kim lineage. Palin is not quite as funny here as he usually is, but that’s small wonder given that he is chronicling his travels to one of the grimmest places on the planet, if one with its own surrealisms—e.g., a statue that depicts, among other heroically revolutionary figures, “two women looking heavenwards, one of them carrying a chicken, the other a television.” Still, one has to smile at the thought of the author showing a video of the famed Monty Python sketch known as the Fish-Slapping Dance to a bewildered audience, a member of which was concerned with whether the large fish in question was alive. Palin also works in a nice sidelong reference to Life of Brian.
More somber than funny but an eye-opening look at a place that doesn’t figure on most travelers’ bucket lists.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-7982-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Penguin Random House Canada
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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