Further evidence, if any were needed by now, of Goodall’s stunning intellectual acuity, broad curiosity, courage, decency,...
The second of a two-volume autobiography (Reason for Hope, 1999) in letters that allows readers to enter the daily life of famed primatologist Goodall.
To label Goodall a primatologist feels particularly limiting after reading these letters, for they reveal her as an astute behaviorist of many creatures (including her husbands), a wonderful mother, someone deeply moved by (and moved to act on) the cruelty inflicted on humans and animals, a reveler in life, and a survivor. Editorial notes from Peterson set the stage, and allow for an understanding of Goodall’s more elliptical remarks. The correspondence ushers us into Goodall’s everyday world—sometimes in Europe and America, but often in the field, where her love of her son Grub melds with her love of such places as Arusha, in Tanzania: “Grub and I have spent our nights at the ‘Golden Grass Den.’ In the evening the setting sun gives every dried blade a gleam of gold, brilliant as metal.” Although chimpanzees have been the focus of her lifelong work, Goodall’s interests are vast (“We have been doing a number of tests on Egyptian Vultures in Ngorongoro Crater with reference to their stone throwing behavior”), and her reflections are broad-ranging and wide. Although she speaks of her husbands with considerable reserve (it was during this period in her life that she divorced Hugo van Lawick and lost Derek Bryceson to cancer), her descriptions of animals are vibrant and arresting—speaking of one of her chimps who was captured for medical research, she observes, “The easiest and most common way to acquire a baby chimpanzee in Africa is to shoot the mother and then pull off the clinging infant.”
Further evidence, if any were needed by now, of Goodall’s stunning intellectual acuity, broad curiosity, courage, decency, and goodness.Pub Date: July 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-12520-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
IN THE NEWS
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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