Heart-pounding action for the avid armchair adventurer.
The gripping account of three extraordinary 2007 maritime rescues near the treacherous waters of the Gulf Stream.
When JP de Lutz, Rudy Snel and Ben Tye set sail from Florida on the Sean Seamour II, they intended to cross the Atlantic to the Azores, then Gibraltar and finally, Saint-Tropez. The first 48 hours were better than anything the men could have ever expected, but after a few days, the weather suddenly began to change. Two otherwise small and harmless weather systems joined forces "to form one super cell that deepened so rapidly that no meteorologist could have predicted its power.” The winds, which forecasters had predicted would top out at 35 knots, increased to more than 80, and the sea became like "the hands of a raging giant" as it tossed and shook the trio's 44-foot sailboat. The force of the waves, which sometimes reached 80 feet in height, gradually ripped the boat apart. Injured and in shock, the men escaped onto a small life raft while an emergency-radio beacon that got swept overboard miraculously sent out a distress call. The Coast Guard Command Center in Portsmouth, Va., received their signal, as well as those from two other ships nearby. A fourth ship went down before help could arrive. Teams of rescue-helicopter pilots and swimmers flew to the scenes of each disaster. By depicting the event from the perspective of both the rescued and the rescuers and focusing only on key moments and details, Tougias (Overboard!: A True Blue-water Odyssey of Disaster and Survival, 2010, etc.) creates a suspenseful, tautly rendered story that leaves readers breathless but well-satisfied.
Heart-pounding action for the avid armchair adventurer.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8333-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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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