Still, Askins’s work has helped reshape the relationship Americans have with wild creatures.
A moving and affective, if overwrought, tribute to the wild.
Askins, who led the wolf recovery program at Yellowstone National Park in the late ’80s and early ’90s, has never been a stranger to wilderness. She spent her youth in northern Michigan and then moved to the foothills of the Tetons, embracing nature in all its unpredictable and nurturing aspects: not just through coming to have a sense of place, but through knowing the independent presence of wild animals, being aware of the “other” that was nonetheless kith on some fundamental level. The author manages to intertwine the evolution of her philosophy—in part, to relinquish our need to control and give rein to the elemental spirit within us—with her passion for wildlife and her political role as a peacemaker/activist for the Wolf Fund. Askins was even willing to don the lobbyist’s togs in an effort to change attitudes toward the reintroduction of wolves to one of their native habitats—successfully so because she was canny enough to entertain the emotions on both sides of the issue, to seek solutions rather than compromises, and to keep her perspective when “the maze of ethics becomes complicated in the face of the potential loss of an entire species” (for example, when golden eagles are feast on the eggs of endangered sandhill cranes). Occasionally, she trots out preposterous generalizations (“The fox is to easterners what the coyote is to most westerners”); more often, in fact pretty much nonstop, she overwrites. It pains her to leave a noun undraped by a compound adjective, a lively adverb often enough thrown in.
Still, Askins’s work has helped reshape the relationship Americans have with wild creatures.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-48222-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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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