Lonely Planet for the realm beyond the “No Trespassing” signs.
A handbook of spelunking's edgier, smellier cousin—navigating the secret passageways of urban areas, particularly sewers and subway tunnels—with a liberal dose of ego and occasional misogyny.
Gates, a tour guide and urban archaeologist, began venturing into the vast substratum below Manhattan ostensibly since he "wanted to see everything in New York City," but it quickly becomes clear that the places that catch his interest are only those where the normal life of the city is absent—the drains and shafts and catwalks that form the hidden infrastructure of the metropolis but that, to the untrained eye, seem primarily distinguished by their rivers of raw sewage and colonies of rats. Occasionally interesting and often befuddling, the narrative chronicles the author’s travels on five continents, hosted by an itinerant but close-knit community of urban explorers who break into cathedrals in the dead of night, climb suspension bridges while intoxicated and practice seduction techniques gleaned from pickup artists. The historical interludes, minilectures on the catacombs of Paris, the aqueducts of Naples, or the Nazi-era bunkers of Odessa, are the book's redeeming feature, but the occasional lazy sociocultural commentary—e.g., a bizarre paragraph explaining Italy's "lack of macho territorial energy that is so prevalent in countries with a more Anglo-Saxon heritage"—will make readers question the author's judgment. Neither living human society nor the natural world elicit much more than a passing glance here. An epic road trip from Brazil through Bolivia to Peru merits barely three pages, much of which is devoted to a qualitative analysis of the smell of the polluted Choqueyapu River.
Lonely Planet for the realm beyond the “No Trespassing” signs.Pub Date: April 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1585429349
Page Count: 352
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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