One of those books you can’t put down, don’t want to finish, and won’t soon forget.
Beguiled at an early age by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Dean (English/Univ. of Tennessee; The Time It Takes to Fall, 2007) deftly chronicles the history of American spaceflight and what the end of the space program means for American culture.
The author structures her narrative around trips to the Kennedy Space Center in order to witness the final space shuttle launches. Seeking “to write about those places where the technical and emotional intersect,” Dean introduces readers to Florida’s Space Coast; the NASA technicians who work on the shuttles; and astronauts, avid space fans, and the locals whose livelihoods depend on the space agency. Like any great storyteller, the author weaves in numerous cultural, political, historical, literary, and personal threads, widening the story’s focus and enriching its texture. Dean notes that the style of writing known as creative nonfiction smoothly overlapped with the beginnings of American spaceflight in the 1960s. The author enlists the voices of such writers as Tom Wolfe, William Burrows, Norman Mailer and Oriana Fallaci for their insights into the saga of American space travel. Dean frequently reiterates her passion for the literature of spaceflight. “When I read all these books,” she writes, “I’m encountering other minds struggling with the same questions while walking the same landscape.” The author analyzes her struggles assembling her manuscript, providing useful insight into her creative process, and she includes her students’ remarkable ideas regarding the space program and its conclusion. Dean recounts the ruthless tactics of professional autograph seekers during a book signing by Buzz Aldrin and shows how Americans’ perceptions of space travel changed after the 1986 Challenger disaster. Throughout, the author’s stimulating prose enhances topics that at first glance might seem lacking in broad appeal—e.g., engineering issues or the politics of NASA’s perpetual underfunding.
One of those books you can’t put down, don’t want to finish, and won’t soon forget.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-55597-709-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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