A straight-ahead, determined account by a straight-ahead, determined woman.
A seafaring Amelia Earhart chronicles her pioneering sailing career.
In 1969, Adams, aboard the Sea Sharp II, was completing her journey from Yokohama, Japan, to San Diego, Calif., becoming the first woman to single-handedly sail the Pacific. Four years earlier, at 35 and in the wake of her second husband’s untimely death, she had—amazingly, with only eight month’s sailing experience—become the first woman to journey solo from Los Angeles to Hawaii. With journalist Coates (Cambodia Now: Life in the Wake of War, 2005), Adams recounts both voyages, undertaken at a time before cell phones, computers and GPS removed much of the risk, when the whole idea of a “lady-sailor” placing herself in such jeopardy inspired controversy. Modestly, Adams makes no great claims for her seamanship or courage, nor does she confess a desire to have achieved any “firsts,” either as a mariner or a woman. Rather, she says, “I simply wanted to sail...alone and didn’t see why I couldn’t.” Notwithstanding the troubled personal life only briefly discussed here—early adoption into an unhappy household, the death of two husbands and divorce from two more, the abandonment her two young children—Adams eschews introspection or grand pronouncements on the meaning of it all. Instead, her story, which certainly contains moments of excitement and discovery, dwells on the sheer banality of such sea ventures, emphasizing the need for persistent labor and attention in the face of freely confessed loneliness, fear, depression, nausea, injury and uncertainty. She devotes a few chapters to her globe-trotting life between and after her notable solo sails, crewing in the South Pacific, joining the Queen Mary’s final voyage and working at the Marina del Rey, but the heart of this book and her importance to history rests with her solo conquest of the vast Pacific.
A straight-ahead, determined account by a straight-ahead, determined woman.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8032-1138-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2008
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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