Pretty pictures and map sketches help make this a dreamy, empowering retirement fantasy.
Psychologist and former actress Stephenson (Billy, 2002, etc.) leaves her glamorous L.A. life for a literary sail in the South Seas.
The author was ready for adventure after 20 years of pursuing a career and taking care of her children. She had been reading about Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson’s late-19th-century voyages among the South Seas islands in search of a salubrious climate for Robert’s ailing health. He suffered from tuberculosis and had been a semi-invalid most of his life. A divorcée 11 years her husband’s senior, Fanny was unflaggingly resourceful, and her spirit of adventure inspired Stephenson to make her own mid-life voyage. She procured a 112-foot Florida sloop, renamed it Takapuna after her New Zealand birthplace and refitted it with all the modern trimmings. She took a crash course in sailing, though she also took the precaution of hiring a professional captain and crew, and learned to handle guns in case of attack by pirates. (Yes, they still exist, though now they’re “entirely unromantic scoundrels with balaclavas in lieu of eyepatches.”) And off she went, with transient family members and friends on board, just as hurricane season was getting underway. From Florida they sailed around Cuba to Panama, the Galápagos and on to the various clusters of South Seas islands from the Marquesas to the Marshalls. The trip logged 19,000 nautical miles in nine months, tracking the Stevensons’ long-ago, pioneering extended stays among the Samoans and other tribes they warmly befriended. Accompanying Stephenson’s cheery chronicle are excerpts from diaries and letters chronicling her predecessors’ trip. “In some of these islands . . . it was, a little while ago, a dangerous possession to own a good set of teeth, as many people were murdered for them,” writes Fanny in one of the many nifty passages illuminating the area’s archaeology and history. The literary connection is tenuous, but Stephenson’s you-go-girl tone is earnest and endearing.
Pretty pictures and map sketches help make this a dreamy, empowering retirement fantasy.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7553-1285-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
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