From a confident, accomplished, and multitalented man, this is an effective demonstration of how to live a fulfilling life.
An uplifting memoir whose essential message is that the best way to defy the limits of time is to live fully in the moment.
Williams, former director of Space and Life Sciences at NASA, reports that the experience of living “a lifetime in a moment” came to him while floating freely in space replacing a faulty gyroscope outside the space shuttle Endeavour. The author, a retired astronaut who has also been an emergency room physician, an aquanaut, and a CEO, fills the narrative with dramatic moments, both high and low. Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight in 1961 was an inspirational moment for Williams. In the first part of the book, he chronicles a youth spent learning resilience and independence. Keen to explore, face challenges, and learn from his failures, he gained entrance to medical school. In the second part, Williams recounts his time as an ER doctor and an astronaut. He writes vividly of the long winnowing process endured by applicants and the rigors of the Canadian astronaut program. In the third part, the author discusses his experiences as mission specialist, a senior executive at NASA, and in a NASA underwater research lab. Throughout the narrative, the author demonstrates an uncanny ability to recall decades-old conversations. These mostly have the ring of truth, and even if they are not the actual words, they make the narrative a smooth reading experience. Though he does not use the phrase “the power of positive thinking,” the philosophy is ever present in the subtext. Williams also writes with equanimity about his special needs child and a bout with prostate cancer. Through his work and personal life, teaching moments abound. “Time is our most precious resource,” he writes, “not to be squandered but to be nourished into rich experiences that will stay with us forever.”
From a confident, accomplished, and multitalented man, this is an effective demonstration of how to live a fulfilling life.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6095-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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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