A funny, irresistibly offbeat tale about the risks and rewards of living, and loving, with an open heart.
A charming memoir of how an Australian woman with a neurotic fear of the ocean set sail across the Pacific with her Argentinian lover.
Graphic artist DeRoche came to San Francisco from Melbourne to accomplish three things within a period of one year: “leave [her] comfort zone, work in a foreign city [and] enjoy some uninhibited fun.” A few months after she arrived, she found herself head over heels in love with Ivan, an Argentinian man she met in a bar. Tall and handsome and, as she found out later, hopelessly clumsy, Ivan had plans to sail his small boat, Amazing Grace, around the world the following year. DeRoche loved that Ivan could dream big, but she hated the ocean and all the “creepy crawly wet things.” For almost half a year, Ivan tried to persuade her to come with him, while the author looked for every possible way that the trip could go wrong. Afraid of dying at sea, but even more afraid of losing the man she realized was the love of her life, she took the plunge and traveled with Ivan “into oblivion.” They sailed to the Marquesas, Society and Cook islands, where they encountered bewitching tropical landscapes, generous natives and other “ocean gypsies” like themselves. But bad storms, equipment failure and leaks that almost sank the Amazing Grace caused DeRoche to finally abandon the voyage in Tonga and leave Ivan to finish the journey alone. The ending to this love story is still a happy one, though, since, once apart, both realized that a life spent testing limits together was the best adventure of all.
A funny, irresistibly offbeat tale about the risks and rewards of living, and loving, with an open heart.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4013-4195-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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
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
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