An illuminating portrait of a childhood of excitement, adventure, and love positioned against the backdrop of 1970s-era...
Reflections on a childhood spent with a feminist, revolution-minded mother.
When Andreas' (International Studies/Brown Univ.; Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America, 2013, etc.) mother died, he found hundreds of her journals, written over more than three decades, including when he traveled with her as a young boy throughout South America. Born in Kansas and raised as a Mennonite, Carol Andreas was not a typical 1950s housewife content to play mother to her three sons. She quickly discovered the political activism and feminism movements of the mid-1960s and wanted to be a part of the revolution, wherever it might take place. After leaving his father and living in a commune for a couple of years, mother and son moved to South America, traveling the countryside and living in squalor to be one with the local people. Throughout the book, Andreas impressively re-creates the settings and conversations that took place in Chile and Peru in the early 1970s. The author fully immerses readers in his experiences, which included a lack of discipline or structure to daily life, poverty, and filth (he notes numerous bouts with lice and invasions of mice), and he captures the love felt between mother and son as they worked alongside the poor. Andreas doesn't hide his mother's obsessive nature, shy away from mentioning details of listening to her numerous lovers while he pretended to sleep mere feet from the bed, or dismiss the angst he felt when he thought about his American father, whom he missed very deeply at times. The author also includes details of his infrequent interactions with his older brothers, who were on their own different paths. The overall picture is one of adventure, self-reliance, and intimacy during times of great change, and Andreas offers an informative perspective on what it was like to be a kid through it all.
An illuminating portrait of a childhood of excitement, adventure, and love positioned against the backdrop of 1970s-era South America.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2439-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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