A series of travel notes that fails to add up to more than the sum of its parts.
An American traveler shares his notes of times abroad.
In his debut memoir, Bermann treats his readers to 10 years of sallies to spots far from his Houston hometown, places such as Colombia, Kenya, and the Philippines. Bermann tells of carrying bottles of alcohol effortlessly through airport security, flirting with attractive women the world over, and endeavoring to make the most of his time away from home. His accounts of many conversations with strangers along the way show him to be a friendly, easygoing sort, as happy to share jokes on the deck of a boat as he is to snorkel with the sharks beneath it. The author is also an avid sports fan, and his account is most absorbing when he describes the many baseball games that he’s traveled to see (“The Boston Red Sox did most of the good things,” he writes of an All-Star game at Yankee Stadium, “but they were booed anyway”). Bermann is a talented sportsman, and he reprints a pageslong passage from his friend Finn Aagaard’s 1992 book Aagaard’s Africa, which describes how Bermann felled a Cape buffalo with a single shot. Bermann’s own detailed prose convincing makes his journeys seem desirable. However, the book often reads like a series of disconnected jottings. Because the text has no proper introduction, readers are left to piece together for themselves who different people are, what prompted several trips, and, in some cases, even what took place. For example, one anecdote about Belize “cave tubing”—traveling through caves in large, inflatable inner tubes—reads, nearly in full, “We had a guide that took us through the caves. After that, we headed back.” What did the caves look like? A few paragraphs later, the author tells of being joined by some young men on a boat: “They carried on about a lot of things that we all got a good laugh over.” What was so funny? Overall, the book fails to take into account such details, which mars a potentially worthy account.
A series of travel notes that fails to add up to more than the sum of its parts.Pub Date: March 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5035-5350-7
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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