Lively and well told.
Colorful biography of a geologist who surveyed much of the American West in the mid-19th century.
Wilson, editor of The American Scholar, begins by showing King (1842–1901) in the 1880s, when Henry Adams's circle admired him not only as a man of action but as a brilliant mind and a ready wit. The orphaned son of a New England trading family, King attended Yale's Sheffield Scientific School, where he excelled in geology, the most prestigious science of the era. After the outbreak of the Civil War, King headed west and soon found a job with the California Geological Survey, headed by Josiah Whitney, a friend of his Sheffield professors. There the King legend began, as he scaled unclimbed mountains, gathered mineral specimens and accumulated an impressive list of adventures—a fair number of which Wilson shows to be tall tales. But King's experience led to a job as director of the Fortieth Parallel Survey, charting the territory between California and the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, in Colorado. This section of the country was important both as a route for the first continental rail lines, and as a possible repository of valuable mineral deposits. Here for the first time, King was leader of an exploration, dependent on the efforts of his team to secure results; while the survey was two years late in finishing, the geological work was some of the most significant of its time. At the end of the survey, King exposed a pair of hoaxers who had conned several wealthy men into investing in a fraudulent diamond mine. At this point the story ends—with King clearly depicted against the background of his time, and his place in 19th-century science firmly established.
Lively and well told.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-6025-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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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