Not just for the armchair traveler, this book would serve as a useful guide for those interested in exploring Mali.
A journey through some of the least traveled sections of Africa.
When Antonson (Route 66 Still Kicks, 2012) had a month free from work, he decided to travel alone to the remotest place he could think of: Timbuktu. The source of legends, Timbuktu is in the heart of Mali, a region not easily traversed by the Western traveler—only 1,000 people a year visit the city—and it’s this remoteness that inspired the author. Some of the strongest moments of the book occur early on, when Antonson chronicles his ride on a “ghost train” across Mali. He offers cringe-worthy descriptions of the filth and tight quarters of the train and colorful portraits of the boisterous villages at which they stopped. Most movingly, he shows the trust and friendships that developed between him and his roommates. Once off the train, Antonson made his way to Timbuktu to attend a world music festival, then spent a single, anticlimactic day in the city itself. Here, he learned of the thousands of ancient manuscripts in need of saving, a cause he later took up upon returning home. The author intersperses historical details of the region and fascinating portraits of previous Western explorers. In the last third of the book, Antonson recounts his walking trek through the Dogon region with an amiable guide. At times, there’s an aloofness to the author’s interactions with the Africans he meets. He seems most concerned with whether they would help him with his travel plans and appears overly insistent on getting his way. He spends quite a few pages on Mohammed, his swindling tour guide, who, while intended to seem devious, actually comes across as quite comic. The book was originally published in 2008, and this second edition includes an afterword by the author about the recent violence in Mali and the threat to Timbuktu.
Not just for the armchair traveler, this book would serve as a useful guide for those interested in exploring Mali.Pub Date: July 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62087-567-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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