The definitive biography of a legendary adventurer.
A world-renowned explorer and prolific writer turns his attention to Ernest Shackleton (1874-1922), a giant of the heroic age of polar exploration, with entirely satisfying results.
Already a biographer of Robert Falcon Scott, it seemed inevitable that Fiennes would take on Shackleton, who dealt successfully with disaster—a unique trait among 19th- and early-20th-century British explorers. Born to an Anglo-Irish family, Shackleton yearned for adventure from childhood. After years as a merchant seaman, he pulled strings to join Scott’s 1901-1903 Discovery Expedition to Antarctica, where he, Scott, and another engaged in a brutal trek toward the South Pole that reached nearly 82 degrees south, a record, before they turned back. Evacuated because of debility, he returned to England before the others and became a national celebrity for his charisma and speaking skills as well as his accomplishments. Yearning to make his own mark, in 1909, he organized an expedition that, after unspeakable suffering, turned back about 100 miles from the South Pole. Fiennes emphasizes that this decision showed intelligence as well as courage because, starving and ill, everyone would certainly have died if they continued south. Fiennes excels in describing Shackleton’s apotheosis. Leading an expedition to cross Antarctica, in 1915, his ship became trapped in ice; nine months later, the ice crushed it. After months drifting on ice floes, he led his men to an isolated island and then piloted a small boat across 800 miles of stormy seas to a whaling station on South Georgia Island to organize a rescue. Having literally walked in Shackleton’s footsteps, Fiennes is uniquely qualified to describe his experiences, analyze his mistakes, and contradict other biographers. While scholars almost universally condemn Shackleton (and Scott) for eschewing skis, Fiennes explains that skis are a hindrance when dragging a heavy sledge. For those inclined to disagree, he points out that he came to this conclusion dragging his own sledge across Antarctica in 1993.
The definitive biography of a legendary adventurer.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-879-4
Page Count: 452
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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