Compassionate and comprehensive.
Lively biography of intrepid, world-traveling ornithologist and cancer survivor Phoebe Snetsinger.
In her first book, journalist Gentile lovingly reanimates Snetsinger’s life (1931–99) using the renowned bird watcher’s memoir (Birding on Borrowed Time, 2003), letters, notebooks, poetry and newsletter articles, as well as interviews with friends and family. The plucky, tomboyish daughter of advertising entrepreneur Leo Burnett, Snetsinger married a high-school friend who became an agriculture professor. By 1965, she was a bored housewife raising four children in rural Minneapolis. When a neighbor excitedly pointed out a Blackburnian Warbler, she became hooked on bird watching. Snetsinger began creating her own “life list,” an inventory of all species seen and identified. She joined local birding groups, which kindled her protective love of nature. Upon her father’s death in 1971, she inherited a large amount of money; it fortified her family and allowed Snetsinger to invest in farmland and travel worldwide to pursue her passion. As her children grew older, and she and her husband grew apart, she spent more time on journeys to such bird-rich locations as Mexico, Indonesia, Ecuador and Trinidad. Following a trip to Panama in 1981, Snetsinger, barely 50, received a crushing diagnosis of terminal melanoma. Believing that she had less than a year to live only accelerated her globetrotting pursuit of as-yet-unseen bird species and her obsession with expanding her unrivaled life list. Gentile details Snetsinger’s increasing recklessness as she experienced years of miraculous remissions from cancer. Her hunt took on “a compulsive, even desperate, tinge” that sacrificed personal health and safety right up to her 1999 death in a driving accident while birding in Madagascar. The book’s chronology is a bit choppy, but the prose delightfully conveys Gentile’s engagement with her subject.
Compassionate and comprehensive.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59691-169-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
