A fascinating look at the adventures of remarkably resilient men, so well-related as to make you feel the chill.
Pulitzer Prize winner Larson (History and Law/Pepperdine Univ.; The Return of George Washington: 1783-1789, 2014, etc.) records the three most important expeditions during a highly significant year in polar exploration.
The Gilded Age was a time of great wealth, and men and women wanted to prove they were more than just society figures sipping champagne. Primary among these was the most famous climber at the time, Prince Luigi Amedeo of Savoy, the Duke of the Abruzzi, who held the farthest-north record at the Arctic and first ascent on mountains on three continents. In 1909, he turned to the “Pole of Altitude” in the Himalayas, “one of the world’s highest mountains.” Mount Everest was out of the question, since Nepal and Tibet had closed their borders, but this would prove an equally difficult challenge. Focusing on the North Pole was American Robert E. Peary, who had mounted seven prior expeditions and had the lost toes to prove it. He had experienced many setbacks—e.g., trying to traverse sea ice that could carry away supplies, disrupt trails, and disorient returning groups. Peary was obsessed with gaining the pole and glory and downplayed scientific records and research while they wintered over. He also plundered the north and the Inuit Nation of religious objects, furs, and tusks. Ernest Shackleton relied on ponies and a fairly useless motor car to transport supplies in the Antarctic. His group included the best of scientific experts, split so one group, led by Edgeworth David, headed for the magnetic pole, which is not fixed but migrates with the Earth’s fluid core, and the other, led by Shackleton, for the geographic pole. Throughout, Larson delivers riveting tales of stalwart explorers risking their lives for discovery in some of the world’s harshest areas. Their successes and even their failures made them heroes.
A fascinating look at the adventures of remarkably resilient men, so well-related as to make you feel the chill.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-256447-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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