Jessop's transporting backstage recollections of life at sea as a stewardess, including hurried departures from the Titanic and Brittanic. Although Jessop provides details of her sickly youth in Argentina (she found saucers her father squirreled away to poison insects and sampled liberally from them) and her role as surrogate parent to four younger brothers, as well as dutiful companion for her widowed mother, this memoir picks up momentum and color when in 1908 she signs on as a stewardess in the burgeoning passenger-ship trade. Jessop writes with an easy and enviable felicity of insufferable charges (``the haughty, gimlet eyes of a certain well-known society woman''), the unwanted gropings from the male staff, her cramped quarters (``so small that to move suddenly meant disaster to some part of one's anatomy''). Jessop ably conveys the complex passenger/steward relationship, which combined discreet social intimacy with a factotum's talent for handling all exigencies of shipboard life. She is also gently droll: ``The floor was generously covered with little skinned rugs that had the appearance of squashed animals.'' The horror of the foundering Titanic—``one awful moment of empty, misty darkness . . . then an unforgettable, agonizing cry went up from 1500 despairing throats, a long wail and then silence''—comes at the reader full force, as does the sinking of the hospital ship Brittanic, whose propellers chopped to shreds one lifeboat after another. From there it was on to her days aboard world cruisers and what is perhaps her saddest story, of a rickshaw driver's love and loss. Throughout, editor Maxtone-Graham (The Only Way to Cross, not reviewed) provides unobtrusive and enormously helpful annotations on ports, protocols, and additional tidbits of biography. Jessop was poised and graceful as a stewardess. She displays the same qualities as a writer. (35 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 18, 1997
ISBN: 1-57409-035-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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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