The depth of feeling here and the writers’ hard-earned experience elevate this volume above many other books in the popular...
The world’s most widely known high-altitude mountaineer reflects on his Everest career.
If you had to pick only one advantage for this fourth memoir from Viesturs (The Will to Climb: Obsession and Commitment and the Quest to Climb Annapurna—the World's Deadliest Peak, 2011, etc.), it’s that the man knows the territory intimately. These in-depth stories about and reflections on Everest by the author—who was first to climb all 14 of the world’s 8,000-plus–meter peaks (by happy accident, by his own admission)—are bolstered by world-class assists from acclaimed adventure writer Roberts (Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration, 2013, etc.). Viesturs wisely shies away from Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air territory (“Is there anything new to say about the disaster on Mount Everest in the spring of 1996? I doubt it”). Instead, the author intertwines the still-gripping stories of his summits between 1987 and 2009 with a critical eye on other legendary exploits, from the great mystery of the 1924 expedition to unique challenges presented by certain routes to unexplained hoaxes through the years. In the process, Viesturs unearths some interesting tidbits that may be well-known to his community but new to laymen. The author, who has been lauded for his compassion and assistance to other climbers, also brings an unexpected attribute: attitude. One question that continually surfaces is whether he believes George Mallory and Andrew Irvine made it to the summit before their deaths in 1924, and Viesturs is brutally candid. “My answer is this: It doesn’t matter whether Mallory and Irvine got to the summit. It’s irrelevant. They didn’t make it back down.” This is followed by the even terser admonishment: “Reaching the summit is optional. Getting back down is mandatory.”
The depth of feeling here and the writers’ hard-earned experience elevate this volume above many other books in the popular “snow and ice” genre.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9473-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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