A slowly unfolding, moving journey of turning beliefs into actions.
A chronicle of the humanitarian efforts by a Ugandan native schooled in the West, addressing poverty and the ravages of AIDS in Africa.
Kaguri, now a university administrator at Michigan State University, was one of the lucky ones growing up in the impoverished rural village of Nyakagyezi, where his father owned a banana plantation. By 1991, while the author was pursuing his studies in Kampala and planning to attend Columbia University, 15 percent of Ugandan adults suffered from AIDS (known in the country as “slim”), as well as nearly 30 percent of pregnant women in cities, which left small children like many of his own relatives without parents. When Kaguri brought his American bride to his village in 2001, the two decided it was time to help some of the two million orphans by starting a primary school where they would receive a free education, books, uniforms, meals and health care. While his father, Taata, refused to offer land or help (he believed Kaguri was a “disobedient son”), he eventually became one of the school’s most enthusiastic supporters. With money donated by American church groups and grants, the Nyaka AIDS Orphans School opened Jan. 2, 2003, with its first 67 students. Much of the book focuses on the struggle to find sustainable funding for the school, and meetings and interviews are drawn out for dramatic effect. The author alternates the main narrative with flashbacks of his youth, providing a snapshot of the daily lives of the Ugandan villagers. Poignant moments include interviews between Kaguri, the school director and young students overwhelmed at the chance to be freed of the drudgery of daily chores and attend school, and heartbreaking scenes in which students die of AIDS.
A slowly unfolding, moving journey of turning beliefs into actions.Pub Date: June 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02184-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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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