In this, the old Africa hand's final book, completed by his wife, Fiona, after his death in 1996, Capstick assembles an admiring and often circuitous biography from the diaries of a lethal and daring soldier of the late British Empire and hunter extraordinaire. As though dictated from an armchair during a long South African evening, Capstick's (The African Adventurers, 1992, etc.) account is anecdotal, repetitive, digression-laden, and composed of hugely elliptical sentences. His insight into his hero's psyche is superficial and often based on Capstick's own predilections. That said, Meinertzhagen's life makes for a ripping good yarn. A child of privilege, he enlisted in the army, landing in British East Africa in 1902 as a young officer in the King's African Rifles. He soon earned fame as a fearless lion hunter, a dedicated soldier who singlehandedly killed scores of restless natives—of the Kikuyu tribe, mainly—and for, of all things, his zeal for ornithology. By WW I, he was fighting in East Africa aginst the Germans and their native allies; as his reputation for ruthless effectiveness grew, so did his quarrels with the British command and his criticism of the Indian troops fighting for the English. His familiarity with the African bush led to a transfer to intelligence, and he served later as a spymaster for Allenby in Palestine. Meinertzhagen seems to have been the Kilroy of the first half of the century: He was present at the Treaty of Versailles; he met Hitler three times in his role as British agent, once carrying a loaded gun with him but failing, to his later regret, to use it; and he tirelessly, in the face of British anti-Semitism, promoted the Zionist cause. He survived shipwrecks, poisoned arrows, airplane crashes, and wild animal attacks, dying in 1967 at age 89. While maddeningly written, with many scattershot and unsupportable observations, not a few firmly in the politically incorrect camp, this is quite a story of one of the last great figures of the colonial age. (7 maps, 10 illustrations)
Pub Date: Feb. 16, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18271-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
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
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
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