This recounting of a Pacific run aboard a merchant marine ship from boating journalist Allen may be prosaic, but it is also lulling, as if it had caught the rhythm of wide ocean swells. Recently married to the first mate of the Endurance, a Titanic-size containership, Allen elects to go along with him on his next assignment. They would ship out of Oakland, Calif., en route to the Far East, with stops in the Aleutians, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Okinawa, and other ports of call, then make a long pull back to Long Beach, Calif. Allen's log of the trip is interspersed with annotations, histories (both personal and maritime), port tours, details of the ship's Brobdingnagian architecture, and a taste of what it is like to work for the merchant marine. She recounts the brutal hours, the quarrels and differences between crew members, the travails of women mariners. Allen depicts a world in flux (though often ruled by protocols dating back to the Hanseatic League): The arts of celestial navigation and sea savviness—skills that tempted the officers to the sea in the first place—have been replaced by global positioning systems and computer printouts. Dismayingly, too, she makes clear that the US shipping industry is taking its last bows; now down to 298 ocean vessels, it's a victim (as Allen would have it) of union bloat and flags of convenience. The book is prey to the doldrums of shipboard life, but when Allen gets a chance- -recalling a brush with mean weather or the abuse a female engineer endured—she can write with powerful immediacy. Allen's voyage may not have been ``two years before the mast'' (seafarer Richard Henry Dana is a great hero of hers)—it was actually two months aft of the mast in a sixth-floor stateroom—but one leaves her book sensing she paints a genuine portrait. (20 b&w photos, map, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-882593-20-0
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Bridge Works
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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