A slow but informative read that is likely to appeal to history and art buffs.
A weighty, prodigiously researched biography of John James Audubon.
Logan makes his debut with an expansive account of the naturalist’s summer expedition to Labrador in 1833, an adventure that he believes hasn’t been fully covered by earlier biographers. Still, readers who haven’t previously studied this 19th-century artist/ornithologist aren’t dropped into the tale midstream. The author devotes more than a third of the narrative to Audubon’s early years, from his birth to an unwed mother in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in 1785, through his years of business failures in the American South, until his successful, herculean accomplishment: the publication of the first volumes of The Birds of America. He personally sold his costly prints by subscription, which were delivered as each volume was completed. In 1833, he still needed some final specimens in order to produce drawings and engravings to complete the four-volume masterpiece. At the time, he was facing production problems in England, subscribers who complained that they weren’t receiving prints in a timely fashion, and the effects of a stroke. Logan believes that the Labrador expedition afforded Audubon the opportunity to reclaim his physical stamina and rebuild his self-confidence. It also marked the dawn of Audubon’s awareness of man’s impact on the environment; he wrote: “When the fish are destroyed as according to present appearances they soon will be and the birds too, what will then be in Labrador. The destruction…is too wicked.” Logan uses copious primary and secondary source materials, including meticulously documented newspaper articles, personal letters, and journal entries written by Audubon and his legion of acquaintances, as well as hundreds of pages of endnotes—some referential, others featuring heavy annotations. He draws a vivid image of a charismatic personality who was, by turns, ebullient, melancholy, obsessed, and inquisitive. Overall, the book is scholarly in tone yet generally accessible. The text becomes a bit wearying at times, loaded as it is with biographical tidbits on just about everyone Audubon met. But the extensive descriptions of the naturalist’s slog through Labrador, the ordeals of ordinary travel, and the nature of 19th-century social networking illuminate the era. The book also includes maps as well as illustrations (not seen).
A slow but informative read that is likely to appeal to history and art buffs.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9972282-1-2
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Ashbryn Press
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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