A genial, readable account of mountain climbing, spaceship travel, and other adventures.
A memoir from an astronaut whom Homer Hickam calls “a wonder, a fellow who has packed in more exploits in his lifetime than most of us can imagine.”
The son of a peripatetic salesman for Boeing, Parazynski is a cosmopolitan space traveler who spent his formative years in far-flung global locales like Athens, Dakar, Beirut, and Tehran. He is a tall, good-looking physician at ease with several languages, and he is also an experienced luge competitor, avid trekker and scuba diver, inventor, and a member of the Explorers Club. While in medical school, he decided he wanted to become an astronaut, enduring the rigorous preparation described by fellow space jocks in similar autobiographies. Parazynski reports on flight training, hours spent underwater in NASA’s space simulator, a stay in Star City, Russia, and—a topic popular in space travelers’ reports—weightless toilet experiences. During his career, the author flew five space shuttle missions and took seven spacewalks. In space, he installed a robotic arm and repaired the International Space Station’s solar array. Aloft, he served as John Glenn’s personal physician. Still up for adventure after retirement, Parazynski climbed Mount Everest, a feat yet unmatched by any other astronaut. Along with some mountaineering jargon (“the terrain is quite technical, with upwards traverses on featureless, snow-dusted slabby rock while under tension from my ascender”), the author offers some NASA nomenclature—e.g., EVAs (extravehicular activity), MAGs (maximum absorbency garments—i.e., diapers), the ISS (International Space Station), and PGT (pistol grip tool). Plenty of former astronauts have written about their careers in books that tend to sound alike with references to family values in the face of profound risk, a hint of philosophy, boisterous camaraderie, natural bravado, true pride, and true or false humility. Among the proliferation of these, Parazynski’s is presented with a bit more panache.
A genial, readable account of mountain climbing, spaceship travel, and other adventures.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5039-3670-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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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