Will appeal to readers of travel and nature books, as well as those who enjoy reading about social interactions and group...
A travelogue chronicling a journey through the Sierra Nevada Mountains and along the path to self-discovery.
When Roberts (English and Creative Writing/Lake Tahoe Community Coll.; Three Hours to Burn a Body: Poems on Travel, 2011, etc.) graduated from college with no plans for the future, she decided to take a monthlong vacation from worrying and embark on a serious hike with two girlfriends. Battling injuries, eating disorders, insecurities and each other, the three women hiked the John Muir Trail in the opposite direction of most hikers, attacking the hardest part of the hike first and ending on an easy note. Though Roberts dealt with many questions about her obsessive journaling, her attention to the exercise pays off in this memoir written almost 20 years after the trip. The writing is mostly engaging and keeps the long days of hiking and fighting interesting to the last page. Even when the constant competition between the girls—over men, how many miles to hike, how much food to eat, who makes the decisions and more—becomes grating, most readers will continue to turn the pages. Though Roberts waxes poetic about feminism and finding happiness outside of a relationship, it is obvious these lessons did not sink in until after the trip ended. Occasionally, these girl-power sidebars feel heavy-handed for a travel memoir, but in general, they flow naturally and honestly from the narrative.
Will appeal to readers of travel and nature books, as well as those who enjoy reading about social interactions and group dynamics.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8032-4012-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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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