Keen and compassionate.
Comprehensive, satisfying biography of the self-proclaimed “P.T. Barnum for the modern age.”
Robert Craig Knievel and brother Nick were raised by their paternal grandparents in depression-era Montana. A youthful ladies’ man, “Bobby” carried his inherent charm into high school, where he excelled in sports rather than academics. Fiercely independent, he left school at 16 to enlist in the Army, got married and had a son, yet continued to get into petty local mischief. He doggedly pursued his love of cycling and eventually found a way to make it pay. After jumping over mountain lions, snakes and Mack trucks, Evel (a nickname of debatable origins) kicked his daredevil days into high gear with a jump over the Caesar’s Palace fountains in 1967, which placed the white jump-suited stuntman into a month-long coma. His subsequent Herculean acts of daring, which frequently ended in crashes, were bolstered by his brilliant mastery of self-promotion. In 1974, after seven years of painstaking planning, the 35-year-old Knievel attempted to jump Idaho’s Snake River Canyon, but crash-landed. His judgment was even more impaired when it came to money and women; he spent far more than the millions he’d earned and during his 38-year marriage had relations with more than 2,000 women (at least according to first-time author Barker’s speculations). He spent six months in prison on assault charges and in 1981, pursued by the IRS for tax evasion, vanished for several years. Encouraged by ’70s nostalgia, a hip replacement and a liver transplant, Knievel came out of hiding in his mid-50s long enough to enjoy the media spotlight. Rock operas, roller coasters and bendable action figures notwithstanding, his self-feted “accomplishments” were more than matched by the mess he made of his life. But Barker earnestly provides a sympathetic spin by noting that Knievel’s greatest stunts occurred during a time in American history when people “badly needed a hero and an escape from the depressing events.”
Keen and compassionate.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-54735-6
Page Count: 326
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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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