Told with sensitivity and joyful enthusiasm, this is an inspiring story that will appeal to many, especially adventurous...
Enchanting tales of “swimming through the veins of Mother Earth.”
Heinerth (The Scuba Diver’s Guide to Underwater Video, 2016, etc.), an award-winning Canadian filmmaker and professional cave diver, delivers an exhilarating, deeply personal memoir about her career as a woman in a male-dominated profession. In spare, crisp prose, she chronicles a “life immersed in a relationship with this element that nourishes and destroys, buoys and drowns—that has both freed me and taken the lives of my friends.” She has learned to “accept and welcome fear” because, as she notes, “more people have died exploring underwater caves than climbing Mount Everest.” Heinerth recounts fighting sudden, torrential underwater cave streams, developing new diving equipment, and suffering decompression illness. She began with diving lessons and got hooked. At 27, she left a lucrative job in Toronto to work at a dive resort in Grand Cayman, guiding visitors through long, sinuous tunnels. On a solo dive, she discovered her first cave, filled with ornate stalactites. The author got certified as a cavern diving expert, later making a name for herself with underwater photography and articles in diving magazines. She chronicles her adventures exploring Florida’s vast network of caves and, in Mexico, a six-hour round-trip swim into the world’s deepest cave. Next up, in 1995, she helped survey the world’s longest underwater cave. A few years later, she was one of the divers to make the first 3-D imaging of an underwater cave. In 2001, with support from National Geographic, she embarked on one of her most incredible adventures. A massive iceberg in the Antarctic Circle had broken off the Ross Ice Shelf, and Heinerth and her crew battled 60-foot wave peaks and ice floes on a Shackleton-esque journey to explore a part of it. Deep within, they found an “ecosystem living in total isolation, an undiscovered world thriving in darkness.”
Told with sensitivity and joyful enthusiasm, this is an inspiring story that will appeal to many, especially adventurous young women.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-269154-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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
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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