A memoir that’s full of adventure but suffers from a general aimlessness.
A winding debut memoir about one man’s globe-trotting escapades.
Lang gives an impressively detailed, almost forensically specific first-person account of his ceaseless travels around the world. His story begins at age 16 with an apprenticeship to a plater in Wales, his birthplace, where he learned a trade and acquired an itch to roam. Off he went to South Africa, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Venezuela, Pakistan, France, China and many other exotic ports of call. The memoir rambles peripatetically through the author’s life, with some abiding themes; for example, he followed work wherever it led him and was incomprehensibly prone to terrifying accidents. In Wales, he accidentally caused the death of his father with a 9-inch grinding disk; a thrown bottle nearly cut off his thumb in South Africa; and he almost died in Saudi Arabia from ulcerated tonsillitis. He had several wives and girlfriends with whom he was destined to be disappointed: “At the time, my Spanish was practically nonexistent, and Carolina didn’t speak any English. To me it sounded like a perfect marriage because she couldn’t argue or complain about anything.” He also sought out increasingly ingenuous ways to avoid sobriety (such as growing marijuana and brewing his own spirits in a makeshift still). But most of all, he courted adventure, sometimes of strange varieties: He managed to have problematic encounters involving voodoo in both Venezuela and the Caribbean; in Kazakhstan, he fled the country to dodge a psychotically violent woman with ties to the KGB; and in Iran, he narrowly missed seeing a young couple executed in the street. His judgments, however, sometimes seem too casually dismissive: “Because it was my first time in Venezuela, I didn’t know that the vast majority of Venezuelans lie, have no respect, and never return money to foreigners.” Lang prefaces this remembrance with an entreaty to the reader to “forgive any spelling, punctuation or grammar mistakes you may find in my story.” There are, in fact, many mistakes, but they might have been forgiven more easily if they were surrounded by a purpose-driven narrative. Overall, it’s hard not to find something of interest in a book so full of risky exploits, but its lack of cohesion ultimately proves wearying.
A memoir that’s full of adventure but suffers from a general aimlessness.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4602-3007-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2014
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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