Though a rather ordinary book, the narrative is relentlessly optimistic and a good source of ideas for merit badge projects.
A cheerily aspirational celebration of Americans who are making a difference.
At the beginning of their latest collaboration, Kyle, widow of “American sniper” Chris Kyle, and DeFelice (co-authors: American Wife: A Memoir of Love, War, Faith, and Renewal, 2015) proclaim that “the pioneer spirit built America,” with apologies to the Native and African peoples who paid the bill (“there is much we regret in retrospect”). Just what that spirit constitutes is a little fuzzy, but the phrase seems to translate as community-building altruism, its proponents “doing their own part to bring order to chaos and to show up for other people.” Allowing that clichés such as “our kids are our future” are just that, clichés, the authors argue that the pioneer spirit is built on the premise that we sacrifice now for a better future. You might not know it from the behavior of the boomers and Gen Xers, but as for the kids themselves, many are doing important things. One example is Alexandra Scott, a victim of neuroblastoma who used part of her short life to operate a lemonade stand that raised thousands of dollars to help children like her—and, now that she’s passed, the Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation for Childhood Cancer raises millions. “All of this,” write the authors, “because one little girl decided to open a lemonade stand in her front yard…and because thousands of other kids decided to copy her.” The authors also discuss the work of veteran Micah Fink, a New Yorker who takes fellow veterans on horseback rides in the Montana wilderness to work through PTSD and “guilt at not being ‘O.K.,’ whatever that means.” Other profiles concern an autistic Appalachian Trail hiker and a blind marathon runner, with many others centering on veterans of recent wars.
Though a rather ordinary book, the narrative is relentlessly optimistic and a good source of ideas for merit badge projects.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-268371-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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
PERSPECTIVES
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