Far from exemplary as a memoir, but Willcox raises important environmental awareness and celebrates Greenpeace exploits,...
Capt. Willcox recounts his environmental adventures at sea in this folksy memoir.
Though most adventure stories show the protagonist experiencing a transformation, Willcox remains the same from beginning to end. Adopted early in his life, the author grew up in a radical household, and his parents butted heads with such figures as Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Throughout his early years, Willcox dedicated himself to progressive causes and maritime activities, particularly sailboat racing. After 30 years captaining ships for Greenpeace and battling abusive corporations around the world, the author seems unwavering in his devotion to the planet. Instead of a textured character study, the author rattles off one seafaring tale after another. “I found myself in Peru, walking around on a dead baby whale with a tape measure in my hand,” begins a typical chapter. The prose is a hodgepodge of anecdotes, journal entries, documents, maps, and footnotes, and it is clear that co-author Weiss struggled to wrangle these meandering tales into a coherent book. But unlike the stereotype of the angry and single-minded activist, Willcox seems earnest and good-humored. After sailing more than 400,000 miles of ocean, the author could begin and end his book anywhere, yet he chooses a strong denouement: arrested by Russian authorities, Willcox and his crew were incarcerated for two harrowing months. Conditions in the prison were medieval, and he had no idea whether Vladimir Putin would grant amnesty for the “Arctic 30,” as his colleagues became known. They had to survive by the old Soviet mantra: “Don’t trust. Don’t fear. Don’t beg.” Willcox is a man of action, and his courage is clear, especially when fighting for such a voluntary cause. But a man without flaws makes for dull reading, and his epilogue fizzles.
Far from exemplary as a memoir, but Willcox raises important environmental awareness and celebrates Greenpeace exploits, which should inspire like-minded activists.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07954-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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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