A riveting account by a compassionate, dedicated man.
The story of a leading conservationist’s efforts to save a dangerously threatened animal,\ and of his role as a mediator in a failed attempt to end armed conflict in Uganda.
Anthony (who died in early 2012) and Spence (The Elephant Whisperer: My Life in the African Wild, 2009, etc.) describe the illegal trade in rhino horns—used for traditional medicine in Asian countries—as so lucrative that it rivals drug trafficking. These magnificent animals, threatened with extinction, were being left to bleed to death, mainly because “on the streets of China or Vietnam, ounce for ounce the horn is more valuable than gold.” As the founder of the international conservation group Earth Organization, Anthony felt called upon to act. When a journalist informed him that fewer than 15 of the rare subspecies of Northern White Rhino were still living, he decided to mount an international effort to save them. To protect the animals from poachers, it would be necessary to remove them from their home in the Garamba National Park, located in a war-ravaged part of Congo. The area was also home to the Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army, a terrorist group that had been fighting a 20-year war. After several reconnaissance visits, and despite securing agreements of support from the various governments and international agencies involved in the area, Anthony came to the realization that unless he could guarantee the safety of park rangers, he would not receive on-the-ground support for a rescue attempt. This led him to make contact with the LRA in an attempt to broker a safe-conduct agreement for the rescue effort. They agreed, and to his surprise, he was asked for help in brokering a peace treaty.
A riveting account by a compassionate, dedicated man.Pub Date: July 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-00451-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
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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