An intriguing account of Button’s troubled life, told with skill and grace.
Imaginative reconstruction of a lost but strangely influential episode in the history of British colonialism.
In 1830, Robert FitzRoy, the new captain of the Beagle, sailed his craft into a natural harbor off Tierra del Fuego, a place of “appalling weather conditions” and “cruel geography.” There they encountered a few weather-beaten natives, a few of whom were commandeered and taken away as specimens for scientists to ponder. Some of these unfortunates died (of smallpox) in passage or soon after landing in England, but one who survived was a young man called Jemmy Button, who was poked and prodded for about a year and then taken back to his homeland when FitzRoy again pointed the Beagle toward South America. Aboard ship with Button this time was the newly hired naturalist Charles Darwin, who saw in the young man evidence of what the ancestors of humankind, “naked and bedaubed with paint . . . their mouths frothed with excitement,” must have been like. Hazlewood hazards that Darwin’s brief encounter with Button influenced the budding scientist’s thoughts on evolution—and Darwin himself wrote, years later, that he would “rather have been descended from [a] heroic little monkey” than from “a savage who delights to torture his enemies.” Having seen the far shores and learned a little English, Button was out of place in his homeland—a place that Hazlewood suggests was indeed not innocent of cannibalism and torture. He acted as something of an unwilling point man for missionaries sent to Christianize his unwilling compatriots, most of whom died in any event of disease and, later, of gunfire from gold-seeking strangers—murders which Button may well have avenged in the slaughter of an unfortunate party of British sailors.
An intriguing account of Button’s troubled life, told with skill and grace.Pub Date: June 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-25213-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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