A prepossessing account of all it takes to enter the hellacious solo race around the Southern Ocean called the VendÇe Globe and how to become a hero. Goss is a can-do guy. He wants to sail around the world, through the roughest seas. Without bluster, he gets on with it. He drums up money and a training boat. He delays his gratification without grumbling when his responsibilities on the home front so necessitate (mouths to feed, a family to love—that comes first), but he keeps his eyes on the prize. Here, in prose as trim as his vessel, he details what it took to finally get a crack at the VendÇe Globe—all the funding proposals, the design testing on shake-out runs——The trick was not to take life too seriously, always see the funny side and never let something brew up until it got out of proportion.” Then, during the race, a hurricane overtakes him; readers, sensing Goss’s reluctance to exaggerate, will appreciate how bad it is when he observes: “No time to tidy the reefing lines. I flaked out the staysail halyard and freed the clutch; couldn’t afford niceties.” The storm is threatening to eat him alive when he gets an SOS: 160 miles away, to windward no less, a fellow sailor is in peril. “The decision had been made for me a long time ago by a tradition of the sea. When someone is in trouble you help.” He miraculously saves his fellow sailor, performs unanesthetized surgery on his own elbow while his boat rolls about in heavy seas, and goes on to finish the race. Goss then turned his up-to-it spirit to writing this book, doing his best to tell the story well, professionally, and honestly and with verve. He pulls that off, too, just like finishing the VendÇe Globe, just like saving a life. Incredible. (16 pages color photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7867-0607-4
Page Count: 282
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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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