Some readers will admire Willis’s courage; others will lament his foolhardiness. All will be vastly entertained.
Was William Willis, who went rafting across the Pacific alone in 1954, the avatar of today’s extreme sports aficionados—or simply out of his mind?
Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 Pacific crossing in a balsa raft, immortalized in his classic documentary Kon-Tiki, inspired numerous imitators. In his first nonfiction foray, novelist Pearson (Glad News of the Natural World, 2005, etc.) refers to Heyerdahl and such subsequent transoceanic rafters as Alain Bombard, Eric de Bisschop and DeVere Baker, but his narrative concentrates mainly on the life and adventures of William Willis, who died in 1968 attempting a solo crossing of the Atlantic at age 75. The wonder is that he lived so long. German-born Willis began his seagoing life as a 15-year-old deck boy. He jumped ship in Texas two years later and spent nearly two decades roaming across America, in 1926 winding up in Manhattan and educating himself at the New York Public Library. Through the years, Willis held more than 50 jobs and authored books and poems all of which were rejected by publishers. In 1938, he traveled to the notorious Devil’s Island and successfully freed a prisoner, the son of his Manhattan landlady. This incident offered a preview of the impulsiveness, bad planning and almost criminal negligence that characterized Willis’s decision at age 60 to cross the Pacific on a raft, simply to see if he could do it. Miraculously, he did it twice. These voyages, during which everything but the result went wrong, form the heart of Pearson’s look at a man whose odd dietary notions, novel fitness regimen, frugal lifestyle and almost mystical belief made him a crackpot by most 1950s estimates.
Some readers will admire Willis’s courage; others will lament his foolhardiness. All will be vastly entertained.Pub Date: June 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-33594-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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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