A sad story, movingly told. (8 pages b&w photos)
A dramatic debut in which Oldham relates the incredible tale of her sailing into, and surviving, Hurricane Raymond in 1983.
In September of that year, Oldham and her fiancé, Richard Sharp, departed Tahiti to deliver Hazana, a 44-foot ketch, to a couple in San Diego. On the 19th day of the voyage, 140-knot winds blew Richard overboard and capsized the boat. Forty-one days later, Oldham arrived in Hawaii alone, the Hazana mangled and mastless, with one small sail tied to the spinnaker pole. With the overwhelming death of her fiancé occurring in the first chapter, Oldham survives her solo adventure by retreating into her mind. Engaged just before leaving Tahiti, she remembers the happy scenes of their courtship: their first meeting in a California boatyard, sailing the South Pacific together, Kon Tiki Island, the pearl farm on the atoll Makemo, Bastille Day on Tahiti. Richard remains an idealization, always saying and doing the right thing. The mundane tasks of making it to Hawaii keep Oldham sane—she takes sextant readings, sails to the proper latitude, and budgets and savors her remaining food and water. She also begins having conversations with the Voice, an internal friend with a sense of humor and good advice that keeps her on course. Two months out of Tahiti, she is rescued just off Hilo, Hawaii, and given a fervent welcome from anxious family and reporters. It takes three beauticians two days to detangle her salt-matted hair. The owners of Hazana arrive and are stunned by the wreck of their boat (before and after photos are startling), and Oldham’s mother takes her home to California. A visit to Richard’s family in Cornwall, England, brings little comfort to anyone. Tami ends on a hopeful note with her marriage to Ed Ashcraft in 1992, the birth of their two daughters, and her seaside life on San Juan Island, Washington.
A sad story, movingly told. (8 pages b&w photos)Pub Date: June 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-7868-6791-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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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