Entertaining reading for the intrepid at heart.
A memoir by a former NFL cheerleader who traded her pom-poms for a life of adventure as globe-trotting primatologist.
Mayor was the American-born daughter of a single Cuban mother who “didn’t take the typical scientist route.” Her love of the natural world began in early childhood, but as she grew older, the pressure to assume a more normative femininity increased. By the time she reached high school, she “had become a full-fledged girlie-girl and performer.” Once in college, however, her passion for wildlife was rekindled, and she soon found herself living a double life as an anthropology student and NFL cheerleader. At 22, the fashion-obsessed girl who idolized Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall earned the first of many grants that would take her to study primates in South America and Africa. For all her research work in the field—and as a roving TV correspondent for National Geographic—Mayor never gave up her trademark stylishness, even when the going got tough. While the author’s colorful background is unquestionably unique for a scientist, she occasionally overplays both her distinguished credentials and the “girliness” that has differentiated her from her colleagues. But this is perhaps understandable given the subtle and not-so-subtle forms of professional discrimination she faced for being an intelligent, attractive woman who also liked “wearing pink boots and tanks tops.” Ultimately, Mayor’s defensiveness and tendency to self-promote is redeemed by the gutsy grittiness and wicked sense of humor that allowed her to survive danger, disease and sexism.
Entertaining reading for the intrepid at heart.Pub Date: March 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4262-0721-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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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