Nicely written, but may disappoint true-adventure buffs.
A young American’s post–prep-school lark in Australia.
A Harvard graduate now living in California, the author proves an engaging writer with a slight story. After a disastrous final year at New England’s Milton Academy and rejection letters from several colleges, 18-year-old Chaffey fell into depression. So he fled his UPS job and girlfriend, traveled to Cairns, in Far North Queensland, with $1,000 and no plans whatsoever, and set out by jeep across the rugged continent. The first half of the book, which pleasingly evokes the customs of the local people, is an episodic account of interesting encounters and odd jobs. Finally Chaffey met a young American herpetologist, and the two embarked on an ill-advised 40-day hike through the outback to the headwaters of the raging Prince Regent River, located in the little-explored tropical land in Western Australia. The author fell in love with the river and its “clear blue pools, artful configurations of rock and tree, orange and yellow leaves stirring gently in eddies, turtles, and clouds, graceful bends in the canyon.” Amid waters infested with deadly estuarine crocodiles, the travelers ran out of food while waiting at King Cascade falls for a boat that never arrived. Making their way through the swamps to safety, they dined on grasshoppers and figs and kept their distance from the fearsome reptiles—though it’s apparent that they never actually posed much of a threat. The author offers a far edgier tale with the story of a croc attack in the same waters years earlier, during which a 27-year-old former American model swam furiously—and unsuccessfully—for a boat moored a mere 80 feet away. Though it’s not a pulse-pounding survival story, Chaffey’s briskly written debut is a fitting celebration of the Australian wild.
Nicely written, but may disappoint true-adventure buffs.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-55970-902-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
