Don’t be surprised if tears of relief flood your eyes after finishing any number of these death-dealing stories.
Wonderfully suspenseful tales of air-sea rescue from Walker (Nights of Ice, 1997, etc.), a veteran chronicler of such acts of heroism.
Although the meat of this story is the rescue of fishermen from the sunken vessel La Conte, Walker sets the stage with a few chapters of rescue operations from the early years—a mere 20 years back—when chopper pilots and rescue swimmers counted prayer as their most valuable tool. Helicopters went down then in scary numbers, but this was the gig the Coast Guardsmen had signed on for, and it is because of their daring that what is practiced today as operational tactics were learned in the first place. Walker paints the history, geography, and citizenry of Alaskan fishing towns with great warmth and evocativeness, and then turns his attention to extreme weather in the Gulf of Alaska. It’s a triple-digit universe: waves over 100 feet, winds over 100 miles per hour, squall lines hundreds of miles in length. Unless you are in the maw of such a hellacious storm, the next most realistic thing is for Walker to describe it to you, especially a night storm, with rogue monster “pitch-black waves moving out of the pitch-black night,” then your boat slipping into the greasy depths of the trough, the air so thick with sea spray it is impossible to breathe. The La Conte never had any business in such weather, and she went down fast with no lifeboat, throwing the 5-man crew into the 40-degree drink in the middle of the night. Tethered together, they were found by a Coast Guard helicopter, but wound up spending more than seven hours in the water, through three separate helicopter missions. At one point, a helicopter was literally dodging waves, hovering at 80 feet to drop the rescue basket only to find a 100-foot monster coming down on them. Unfathomably, three of the fishermen were rescued.
Don’t be surprised if tears of relief flood your eyes after finishing any number of these death-dealing stories.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26971-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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