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 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
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