Liberating reading for armchair adventurers.
A National Geographic explorer’s account of the three years she spent trekking alone through wild and sparsely populated regions in Mongolia, China, Siberia, and Australia.
Marquis undertook her six-country walkabout in June 2010, two years after she began to experience the “sublime sensation” of restlessness that told her it was time to depart her native Switzerland for another adventure. She began in Mongolia near the Siberian border, intending to work her way south to the Gobi Desert. The dusty, wind-swept terrain was as beautiful as it was harsh, and its inhabitants and animals did not always welcome her presence. Consciously pushing her body to the limit, Marquis endured scorching temperatures by day and subzero temperatures by night and managed to avoid becoming ill in a place that threatened her health with everything from diphtheria to the plague. But an abscessed tooth forced her to delay her journey across the Gobi, which she crossed in 2011. She resumed her travels in China, near the Yangtze River. After hiking the Sichuan Mountains and crossing a panda preserve, the Chinese police arrested Marquis to prevent her from possibly reporting on the immolation of a priest who died 12 miles from where she had been traveling. Undaunted, she headed to Siberia and crossed a portion of the taiga near Lake Baikal before moving on to Laos and Thailand, where she escaped an attack by drug traffickers and survived a case of dengue fever and, later, stomach worms. Marquis then sailed to Australia and trekked across a stretch of forbidding outback between Darwin and Cairns before finishing her remarkable journey in southern Australia. Though the pacing is uneven and the story at times haphazardly structured, the author’s passion for exploring and testing her mind, body, and spirit are evident throughout. As she writes, “movement is lifesaving; it calls everything into question, everything that’s around us that lives, breathes, moves.”
Liberating reading for armchair adventurers.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08197-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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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