Exemplary travel writing: inspiring, moving, heartfelt, and often breathtaking.
A debut travelogue chronicling a modern explorer's bicycle ride along the ancient Silk Road, a journey that beautifully reveals much about the history and nature of exploration itself.
“Born centuries too late for the life I was meant to live,” Harris cultivated an early love affair with wilderness, exploration, and the unknown. Due to a chance encounter with a children’s book, the author became particularly intrigued by Marco Polo, and she “decided to be just like him when I grew up.” Though she studied at such prestigious institutions as Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and MIT, school was merely “a venue…for exploration.” While the narrative is peppered with brief, entertaining vignettes about some of the author’s early travels, the meat of her story is the nearly yearlong bike ride following the Silk Road with her pal Mel. With humor, deep sentiment, and often poetic prose, Harris takes the reader not only through “the stans” (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, etc.) of Asia, but also through the history and current state of adventure travel. Along the way, the author provides insightful discussions of national borderlines, for which she clearly has little use. “The more I learned about the South Caucasus, with its closed borders and warring enclaves,” she writes, “the more the place seemed like a playground game of capture-the-flag, all in the dubious name of nationalism.” This is a tale of beautiful contrasts: broken landscapes and incomparable mountain vistas, repugnant sights and smells and euphoric baklava hangovers, geographic neighbors at war and the moving hospitality of total strangers. Harris explains the grueling and sublime nature of biking through descriptions of impoverished yet beautiful places as well as the fraught history and hopeful future of her kind. “Explorers might be extinct, in the historic sense of the vocation,” she writes, “but exploring still exists, will always exist: In the basic longing to learn what in the universe we are doing here.”
Exemplary travel writing: inspiring, moving, heartfelt, and often breathtaking.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-283934-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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