A new love adds depth to this engaging story of personal growth.
The abrupt end to her marriage left climber and skydiver Davis (High Infatuation: A Climber's Guide to Love and Gravity, 2007) depressed and without a sense of purpose—but not for long.
For 12 years, the author writes, she and her husband led a life of “pure adventure and self-invention, and nothing about it was safe.” Traveling around the world, they challenged each other to various daredevil adventures, including difficult solo climbs without ropes. All this changed when her husband defied an unwritten rule against climbing a possibly fragile sandstone arch in a national park in Utah. He became the target of a media-fueled outcry. Under the threat of criminal proceedings, the pair lost the commercial sponsorship that had sustained their frugal existence, and he abandoned her and disappeared. Skydiving was the one experience she had been unwilling to share with her husband; after 20 years as a rock climber, a fear of falling was ingrained in her. Now, however, Davis was determined to engage in this new challenge. She provides a gripping account of how she overcame her fears and her delight as she mastered the skills needed to skydive. While the adrenaline rush from landing safely is part of the thrill, the intense mental focus necessary for making split-second decisions on opening her chute was also addictive. Overcoming her previous fears, she combined solo rock climbing with potentially dangerous jumps from rocky peaks but received a necessary lesson in caution when she lost control during a jump and was injured.
A new love adds depth to this engaging story of personal growth.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1451652055
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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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