Merits a place in the small but rich library devoted to the peoples of Siberia and the Arctic, reminiscent at times of V.K....
A graceful, moving story of cultures in collision—and concord—in the far north.
Chukchi writer Rytkheu, a native of the Chukotka region of far northeastern Siberia, is well known in Europe but new to American audiences. Influenced by Gogol and other classic Russian writers, he presents a matter-of-fact, sometimes almost ethnographic account of a conflict between outside and indigenous cultures, set in the early 20th century. The crew of a Canadian vessel, trapped in Arctic ice, set off dynamite in an effort to break the ship free; one unfortunate crewman, John MacLennan, is badly wounded in the attempt. “They should have waited a bit,” remarks a Chukchi who happens on the scene. “A south wind coming.” The reluctant captain decides to offload the wounded sailor in hope of getting him to a Russian hospital, though John is sure that he’s in for a bad time with “these savages”: “Their faces don’t inspire my trust. These people are just too unsavory-looking. Unwashed and uneducated.” As it happens, Rytkheu’s Chukchi know a thing or two about the healing arts, and soon a shaman is on the job, though John is distressed at losing certain body parts. (“ ‘What’s he wailing about?’ she inquired of Orvo.” “ ‘Crying over his hands,’ said the old man.” “ ‘Understandable,’ the shaman-woman nodded.”) Recovering, nursing his self-pity, John wonders whether he will ever be able to show himself among his own people again, even as his generous hosts do what they can to make him feel at home. As other outsiders come and go in ever increasing numbers, cultural misunderstandings ensue, while an ever-evolving John, formerly certain that his hosts were cannibals, is now inclined to think, with his Chukchi friend and benefactor Orvo, that “the less we come into contact with the white man’s world, the better.”
Merits a place in the small but rich library devoted to the peoples of Siberia and the Arctic, reminiscent at times of V.K. Arseniev’s classic Dersu the Trapper and at others of James Houston’s memorable White Dawn.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-9749680-7-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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
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