A very brief memoir companionably related.
A London-based lawyer recollects some of the more memorable moments of his long career.
Debut author Altman was born in London, but in 1939, his family relocated to Manchester in the hope—ultimately frustrated—that they could avoid the German bombing campaigns during World War II. The son of a milliner who had big aspirations for all four of his kids, the author took an interest in the law and was mentored by his older cousin Cecil, who was already a working solicitor. He graduated from King’s College London and developed an expertise in property law. After a stint in private practice, he became an in-house solicitor at a public property company, a post he held for nearly two decades. Most of Altman’s remembrance is less a linear chronicle than a series of anecdotes—he frequently recounts his most memorable cases and draws general lessons from them sure to be helpful to the novice lawyer. The repeated moral seems to be relentless diligence—often a seemingly routine assignment goes awry due to a lack of preparatory research. Altman became a prominent lawyer eventually and handled property deals for members of Parliament and even for Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was then looking for a new headquarters for the Labour Party. He also had an opportunity to give back and sat on a committee that tackled the issue of affordable public housing. Altman’s memoir is breezily charming and unpretentious, and some of his stories are worth sharing, though most don’t qualify as remarkable adventures, as the subtitle suggests. But they can be endearing and relentlessly cheerful. For example, while flying to Rome, he realized the pilot was a client and was invited into the cockpit and then out to dinner after the flight. The prose can be a touch long-winded and convoluted, and some of the stories are less than notable—there’s one about being unable to find a good mattress in a hotel in the Canary Islands—but Altman’s good-natured optimism generally carries the day.
A very brief memoir companionably related.Pub Date: March 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5245-9783-2
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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