Seemingly covering disparate topics, Baker beautifully connects them all with an incisive, clear writing style and sharp...
A Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist takes readers on a journey through the Indian subcontinent at the closing of the British Empire.
Baker (The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, 2011, etc.) narrates the stories of geologist John Auden (1903-1991) and surveyor Michael Spender (1906-1945), who both thoroughly explored this mysterious region of the world. They worked together on a survey expedition to map K2 and the surrounding Himalayas in a time before nylon tents, fleece bedrolls, and oxygen tanks. Harboring a secret desire to conquer Mount Everest, Auden diligently studied and surveyed the mountains to learn how and why the range was formed. While he, as many, did not accept the theory of continental drift, he was the first to notice the Main Central Thrust, the fault that runs the 1,500-mile length of the Himalayas. His observations and classifications of the composition and arrangement of rocks fueled countless post–World War II projects as India modernized. Spender brought his craft of photogrammetry—making measurements from photos (aerial and otherwise)—to create topographic maps. During the war, he helped define the art of photographic interpretation. With a host of interpreters working for him, he identified Nazis amassing equipment for invasions. Refreshingly, Baker doesn’t just focus on these two remarkable men. She also engagingly discusses the men and women who explored world events with art, poetry, and prose, seeing different angles and using different tools. W.H. Auden (John’s brother), Stephen Spender (Michael’s brother), Nancy Sharp (Michael’s wife), and Chris Isherwood all helped to map the cultural landscape of that era. In India, there was Sudhin Datta, a Bengali intellectual who founded Parichay, a literary journal for men of letters, and was the host of a weekly discussion group in Calcutta.
Seemingly covering disparate topics, Baker beautifully connects them all with an incisive, clear writing style and sharp descriptions of the terrain. A book for any readers curious about India after 1900.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55597-804-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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