While lively and chock-full of eye-opening tidbits, the book’s simultaneous coverage of firefighting history, Twain and...
True-crime veteran Graysmith (The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shower, 2010, etc.) uses Mark Twain’s most famous character as a springboard for exploring San Francisco’s rocky beginnings as a boomtown plagued with crime.
For anyone who believes that the City by the Bay has always been a peace-and-love destination renowned for its bridges, seals and winding streets, this book will prove to be a wake-up call. Graysmith re-creates the lawless decade that began with the 1849 Gold Rush and the attendant lack of infrastructure that turned the city into a literal hotbed—in less than two years, an arsonist and his accomplices burned it to the ground on six different occasions. In their haste to get rich, prospectors had erected flimsy structures that practically beckoned firebugs to strike matches. Gangs stalked the streets, harassing, robbing and even killing citizens. The streets themselves were cobbled together from wooden planks and glass bottles, making the work of firefighters and police extremely difficult. Into this melee strode young Tom Sawyer, a former New York volunteer fireman who had gone west to seek his fortune. In the days before steam engines and gas lamps, a corps of boys ran ahead of the hand-pumpered fire trucks with torches to light the way through San Francisco’s treacherous streets. As one of the most loyal and dedicated torch boys, Sawyer caught the eye of visiting writer Mark Twain; the two became fast friends, with Twain mining Sawyer’s adventurous past for his novel. Graysmith also peoples this rich and sometimes overwhelming account with a bevy of characters instrumental in rebuilding San Francisco in the wake of each successive blaze.
While lively and chock-full of eye-opening tidbits, the book’s simultaneous coverage of firefighting history, Twain and Sawyer’s relationship, and crooked political alliances, along with its zigzagging timeline, threaten to deluge readers with details.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-72056-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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