History at its most exciting and revealing.
A dense but enlightening history of a highly significant 18th-century vessel.
Moore (Creative Writing/Univ. of London and Univ. of Oxford; The Weather Experiment: The Pioneers Who Sought to See the Future, 2015, etc.) goes well beyond simple history or a mere tracking of the Endeavour’s exploits. Though the minutiae may seem daunting at first, readers should stick with it, as the narrative transforms into a page-turning, breathtaking adventure story for the ages. Built in 1764 and initially christened the Earl of Pembroke, the ship was flat-bottomed and featured an open hold, reinforced hull, and bulldog nose that was designed for strength rather than beauty. Her first life was as a collier, transporting coal to London. Enter Alexander Dalrymple, long a student of the South Seas, who was determined to find the southern continent, Terra Australis. The Royal Society appointed him as observer of the expected 1769 transit of Venus across the sun. The king’s funding made this an Admiralty voyage, which required a naval captain; officials didn’t choose Dalrymple, but they used his plans. James Cook would take the helm of the now renamed Endeavour, accompanied by naturalist Joseph Banks, who was well-versed in Carl Linnaeus’ new taxonomy system, and artist Sydney Parkinson. Idyllic days in Tahiti were followed by a complete circumnavigation and mapping of New Zealand and parts of Australia’s coast. The reactions to the ship’s arrival varied from distrust to fear to belligerence to aloofness. Her sudden discovery of the Great Barrier Reef illustrates just how perfect ship and captain were for the job. Among the many other discoveries thrillingly recounted by Moore: birds, fish, arthropods, and more than 30,000 botanical specimens. In her third life, the Endeavour made a series of journeys to the Falklands. As the author notes, “her biography roams across the history of the time, binding into a single narrative diverse moments of true historical significance.”
History at its most exciting and revealing.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-14841-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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