Just what a biography should be: sharp, evocative, and brisk.
Veteran journalist Thompson limns an authentic American life.
Studly astronaut Alan Shepard (1923–88), scion of an old New England family, was born just two decades after the Wrights launched at Kitty Hawk. After Navy service in WWII, Shepard honed his flying skills landing jets on pitching carriers in the dark before becoming a superlative test pilot. Cool, competent, and confident, his skills took him to NASA as one of the original Mercury Seven, America’s first team of astronauts. Adroit at astro-politics, Shepard fiercely angled for first place above his six equals, clean-cut John Glenn being his prime competitor. In 1961, as Russia maintained its decided space advantage, Shepard was launched by a Redstone rocket on a fast trip that took him 302 miles from where he started. The NASA script reserved in case of disaster was scrapped, Thompson notes, in his fine reconstruction of the suborbital flight. Possessed of a beautiful wife and an engorged ego, Shepard flamboyantly womanized. He was mercurial: charismatic and playful sometimes, arrogant and hard at others. Temporarily grounded because of an inner-ear disorder, he acted as Chief of NASA’s Astronauts Office. Surgery cured the dizzy spells, and Shepard, still looking for envelopes to push, maneuvered to get a booking on a trip to the moon. A decade after his first flight, he took command of Apollo 14 and whacked a golf ball across the lunar surface. He was 47 and weighed more when he returned than when he left. He had, it seemed, more of “the right stuff” than anyone else. Like the other Mercury astronauts, he didn’t care much for Tom Wolfe’s wildly popular account of their exploits, but Thompson’s rendition of the sheer audacity displayed as mankind left the Earth easily equals Wolfe’s. Shepard, retired from the Navy as a rear admiral, died a Texas capitalist, followed within weeks by his loyal wife.
Just what a biography should be: sharp, evocative, and brisk.Pub Date: March 23, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61001-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
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
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
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