A vividly written narrative of an amazingly diverse world still to be explored, whose destruction, as Rosolie wisely notes,...
In his first book, naturalist and explorer Rosolie chronicles his many thrilling experiences since 2006, when he first traveled to a research center located in a primordial jungle region of the Amazon basin, now threatened with unregulated development.
Now running Tamandua Expeditions to support conservation initiatives, the author was then an 18-year-old college student searching for volunteer opportunities to work with a conservation organization. During a college break, the author seized on an opportunity to spend a month at a jungle research center in southeast Peru, serving as an assistant in recording observations of the species inhabiting the area: spider monkeys, jaguars, crocodiles, a wide variety of snakes and more. This was the first of many trips to the center, which became his spiritual home. During his college years, he commuted back and forth from New Jersey to the Amazon; over time, he became an accomplished guide. Back home again, he worked to raise donations for the research center, which was a hand-to-mouth venture, and he also arranged ecotourism expeditions and volunteer groups to work at the center. Rosolie describes his deepening understanding of conservation and the issues involved in protecting natural ecosystems against would-be developers, loggers, mining interests and poachers. First and foremost, however, this is a gripping adventure story packed with plenty of adrenaline-filled encounters with massive snakes, intimidating jaguars and other creatures. On one occasion, the author was carried downriver while grasping the back of a gigantic anaconda “as thick as a small cow and easily well over twenty-five feet long…the mega-snake of legends.” As the author writes, “[a]dventure in its purest form is raw discovery. The draw to see what's around the next bend becomes hypnotizing; I was drawn forward by the powerful tide of the forest.”
A vividly written narrative of an amazingly diverse world still to be explored, whose destruction, as Rosolie wisely notes, would be a devastating loss for humanity.Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-0062259516
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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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