Enthusiasts will love it; others may grow bored.
The editor in chief of Living Bird magazine writes about his favorite feathered friends.
Noted for tracking down the famously elusive ivory-billed woodpecker (The Grail Bird, 2005), ornithologist Gallagher is also an ardent falconer. His boundary-stretching memoir chronicles coming of age with birds of prey. Reared in a bleakly dysfunctional family, the author discovered in adolescence a lifelong idol: Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, author of the classic text on keeping and training raptors. Gallagher’s admiration for Frederick gave rise in later years to an Italian tour in homage to his hero. He offers a report on what he did on that vacation, the interesting spots he missed and the crafty locals who took his luggage. It was depressing, but the author discovered good cheer as well during soulful trips to famous grouse moors, meetings and group hunts with colorful, world-class falconers. Indeed, most of his book concerns adventures and fellowship with the artists who train and run these darting and diving feathered hunters. Falconry is an art, Gallagher declares, proffering a rapturous vision of the sport that has spanned continents and millennia, in addition to his recollections of all the old fowlers and birds he will never meet again. Tiercel prairie falcons, Cooper’s hawks, Gyrfalcons and buteos throng his pages, as do the tools of the trade: hoods, creances, swivels, jesses and, recently, telemetry devices. Pigeons, ducks, mice and rabbits are clobbered, albeit with grace and intelligence, in a narrative quite red in beak and claw. Gallagher’s favorite bird is named Macduff, but it’s readers not totally enraptured with hunting birds perched on gauntleted fists who are likely to be the first to cry “Hold, enough!”
Enthusiasts will love it; others may grow bored.Pub Date: May 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-618-80575-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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