Exciting historical tales with romantic overtones.
A nuanced account of the English captain saved by Pocahontas reveals an astonishingly complicated personality.
Former BBC producer Firstbrook (The Obamas: The Untold Story of an African Family, 2011, etc.) finds in the roguish, quarrelsome, fearless adventurer Capt. John Smith a sterling example of the tenacious early-American character. Before the 27-year-old Smith ever came to Virginia to make his fortune in 1607, he proved himself an ambitious knight-errant, as he later recounted in his autobiography and elsewhere. A Lincolnshire tenant farmer’s son, Smith wanted to find adventure rather than inherit the family farm when his father died, so he became a mercenary sailor fighting the Spanish, making connections to better himself and filling the gaps in his education. His adventures took him across the continent, from Spain to Austria-Hungary, where he enlisted to fight against the incursions of the Ottoman Empire, battling duels to the death and even being taken captive and enslaved by the Turks. Having escaped and returned to London, he ingratiated himself with British merchants hoping to capitalize on the recent discoveries in the New World, such as the ill-fated Roanoke Colony of Virginia, sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh. Resentful of the aristocrats in control of the London Company–funded expedition, Smith managed to get locked up for mutinous behavior during the trip out, and only his much-needed skills as a soldier and farmer kept him from being hanged once they arrived in Jamestown. Firstbrook gives Smith the benefit of the doubt in his account of being saved from the Powhatans’ chopping block by chief Wahunsenacawh’s favorite daughter, Pocahontas—as befits an intrepid leader who was fiercely committed to the New World effort and instrumental in its survival over the first two murderous winters.
Exciting historical tales with romantic overtones.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1851689507
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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
PERSPECTIVES
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