The record of a flight, in the summer of 1991, to each of the contiguous 48 states in a WW II-vintage biplane trainer, by bestselling novelist Coonts (Flight of the Intruder, etc.). Though the subtitle seems to beg the book's comparison with John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley or William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, Coonts's gee-whiz tone soon places his book into a kind of upbeat appreciation of America rather than into a dour, midlife odyssey. You'll recall that Steinbeck was at the end of a long, somewhat soured career, while Heat-Moon had lost in love and seemed to be at the end of his career. Coonts, however, is divorced but riding a crest of popularity, and to pursue his chief passion, old airplanes, with the book already bankrolled is a wonderful lark. Even to include his 14-year-old son, David, on part of the journey seems calculated, although the father-son takes are appealing, particularly when David, high above the earth, folds his arms and announces, ``I'm bored.'' Coonts makes pilgrimages to such shopworn shrines as Disneyland, Hannibal, and even Mt. Rushmore, but he hasn't here much fresh to say about them; he's just a tourist. On the other hand, the culture of the private plane comes delightfully to life as Coonts marvels at a country where every little town has its strip, its laconic air controller, its cheap, clean motel just down the road. His observations on world politics seem pedestrian, but his insight into general aviation is clear and noteworthy: ``The general aviation industry is dying. Federal regulation and the legal system have driven it to the lip of the grave where it is waiting to expire and fall in.'' Middle-class, upbeat to a fault, and unmeditative. Yet the descriptions of flight and the portrait of an America seemingly trapped in a time-warp are arresting. (Eight page photo-insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: June 8, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-74884-X
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992
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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