An astute, absorbing account.
Potent memoir demonstrates the dangers of collecting and dispersing news from behind the Iron Curtain. The book is dedicated to slain journalist Anna Politkovskaya and “the other Russian and Soviet journalists who died under mysterious circumstances after the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
Daniloff (Journalism/Northeastern Univ.; Two Lives, One Russia, 1988, etc.) began his career as a copy boy for the Washington Post in 1956. Following a brief trip to Moscow in 1959 and stints working in London, Paris and Geneva, the author followed his father’s Russian bloodline and headed back to the country to work as a junior UPI correspondent in 1961. Early on, his expectations about the Soviet Union were debunked by the bureau chief, Henry Shapiro. With an exacting eye for detail and a flair for storytelling that captures the uneasy mood of the times, Daniloff provides captivating anecdotes about his days in Moscow—and many surprises. For example, he recalls the unusually pleasant living conditions, with chauffeurs and imported foods available at the drop of a hat. He also reveals more familiar details about strict censorship, how many contacts were not to be trusted and how important conversations were often conducted outside, away from potential bugs. The author also offers a unique perspective on many key events of the times—including Kennedy’s assassination (Daniloff’s bureau filed a story about Lee Harvey Oswald’s time in Russia not long before he traveled to Dallas) and the space race—all told in front of a vivid backdrop of fear and paranoia. Recollections of Daniloff’s career outside the Soviet Union, such as his stint as a foreign-affairs correspondent on Capitol Hill in the mid ’70s, prove less interesting, but he doesn’t linger too long on these sections. The book reaches a natural conclusion with a reprinted interview from U.S. News & World Report, in which Daniloff muses on how life has changed in the Soviet Union during the 20-year period since he first traveled there, and a chapter that details the chase for information during the Chernobyl disaster.
An astute, absorbing account.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8262-1793-6
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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