Alas, Feynman never got to make the journey. His stomach cancer caught up with him and he died in 1988. Leighton, the high-school math teacher who was Feynman's close friend, fellow drummer, and chief amanuensis (with two wonderful Feynman-told- to-Leighton biographies to his credit) narrates the saga of what began as a typical Feynman tease: Leighton, complaining that math was okay, said what he really wanted to teach was geography. Feynman, testing his knowledge, asked ``Whatever happened to Tannu Tuva?'' Therein lies the tale. Tuva, to young stamp-collector Feynman, had been a set of handsome triangular and diamond-shaped stamps. Once an independent country northwest of Mongolia, it was annexed to the Soviet Union in 1944. What's more, its capital was spelled Kyzyl- -enough of an absurdity to make getting there the cause cÇläbre that would occupy Feynman and Leighton for the next ten years. It was the Soviet bureaucracy that did them in. First, they were told that since there was no Intourist agency there, it was no- go. Undaunted, they proceeded to track down every Tuvan authority in the world, and found grammars, phrase, and travel books that only whet their appetites more to see the yurts, yaks, and nomads, explore the art and ruins, and hear the native ``throat'' singers—able to sound two vocal lines simultaneously. They learned to write fractured Tuvan and ultimately arranged to have a major show of nomadic art tour the US. But the bureaucratic confusions and conflicts between Moscow and Tuva and Los Angeles, not to mention demands for rubles, always snatched the prize just when it was in sight. Since the book focuses more on the frustrations of making the trip and less on Feynman, it is not as satisfactory as the earlier books. On the other hand, it says a lot about coping with the bureaucracy and, yes, Leighton did eventually make it to Tuva.
Pub Date: April 29, 1991
ISBN: 0-393-02953-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
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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