Not so much a conventional memoir as a series of anecdotes. While its insights are limited, those looking for glimpses into...
Game designer, entrepreneur, and adventurer Garriott de Cayeux explores a number of his escapades.
The author, who describes himself as a “serial enthusiast” with an “almost desperate need for adventure,” is best known as the creator of the first massively multiplayer online role-playing game, “Ultima Online.” During his Dungeons & Dragons–playing youth in the 1970s, he learned how to program computers; along with his brother, they began crafting video games, including a large number of “Ultima” games. His descriptions of the challenges of dealing with the surprising success of “Ultima Online,” though disappointingly brief, make up the most fascinating portion of the book. The author is clearly exhilarated to find ways to make his world more detailed and fend off those attempting to destroy it, and he is astonished to observe the growing intersection between the economy of his world and the real-world economy. With the fortune he made in his various companies, he has gone on to put his dreams into action: he built a haunted house for himself in Austin, Texas, rode in a submarine down to where the Titanic rests (and almost got trapped in the process), and, most famously, bought a two-week sojourn in the Russian section of the International Space Station, an experience he discusses mostly in relation to the difficulties of using the restroom in space. This is not a book in which other people feature heavily or in which the dots are connected, though the author’s stories are lively and entertaining. He embeds puzzles and games in the book for those who want to take it beyond the simple experience of reading.
Not so much a conventional memoir as a series of anecdotes. While its insights are limited, those looking for glimpses into an adventurous life should be pleased.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-228665-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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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