In the true spirit of a participant/observer's way to knowledge, sports journalist Dugard tackles the vigorously insane sport of adventure racing. Any way you slice it, the Raid Gauloises is an extreme sport. Usually about a week long, the event requires teams of five (each with at least one woman, and all team members must finish) to get from point A to point B by a variety of hellacious means: sea kayaking among sharks, parachuting into remote forest clearings, full-spate whitewater rafting, claustrophobic spelunking, cruel marches, ice climbing. All this—plus an entire zoology text's litany of evil creatures, from vicious microbes to disturbed crocodiles, since the Raid is held in venues like Madagascar and Borneo—for a pitiful $35,000 prize. Dugard covered a few of the early Raids (they began in 1989) as a journalist under the same appalling conditions endured by the contestants—rain, cold, heat, mud, leeches, etc.—but experienced a lot more boredom. An endurance runner and triathlete, Dugard found it hard to just stand there, so he formed his own team for the 1995 Patagonian Raid. Dugard's story here gets bogged down in logistics, losing the elasticity of his sports reporting, and when he drops out due to a knee injury, he endlessly flails himself with self-recrimination, and the story grinds to a halt. Fortunately for Dugard and his readers alike, he is more successful in the 1997 Lesotho Raid, in which he is allowed to race independently, waiting a chance to join a team when a member drops out. The narrative regains its bounce as he details his misery, his adopted team's dynamics, and the exultation of finishing. ``Each moment of each day is lived with incredible intensity,'' notes Dugard: intense pain and fear, yes, and intense dehydration, hunger, disorientation, personal filth. Not everyone will feel the Raid's calling. (16 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-07-018129-2
Page Count: 175
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
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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