Remarkable and God-awful.
A surgeon’s graphic report on frontline medical work in one war-torn landscape of misery after another.
The author has a steady voice, unflinching before all he has seen, but he spurns the sonorous, often spurious authority many surgeons assume. By contrast, Kaplan is willing to admit doubts and failure. He practices under traumatic circumstances in the immediacy of combat, which entails a seat-of-the-pants operation. He often works with a pack of rogue surgeons willing to travel to places where other, better-known, better-funded medical organizations refuse to go for fear of political or ethical complexities. Burma, for example, certainly presents a morally ambiguous situation: the brutal government is waging war against a druglord who has declared the Shan Free State; there are no good guys, but lots of injured people. After recounting his medical training in England and the US, Kaplan narrates his return to his native South Africa, where he quickly became involved caring for the wounded in Namibia and Zululand. He found professional fulfillment and a heightened sense of humanity in the presence of brutality and pain, a paradox he still lives with. Chronicling his work in places like Eritrea and Kurdistan, Kaplan not only describes the operating theater but also tries to make sense of the political theater (often enough a tragically absurd one) that gave rise to these conflicts. At one point, he sought a break from the misery and frustrations by becoming a cruise ship’s on-board doctor, a gig that turned out to pose the greatest threat to his professional integrity. So it was back to the front, where on a bad day, “through my palms and fingers I felt him die.” Despite his revulsion at the largely preventable suffering, Kaplan maintains his commitment to healing human beings who may someday do better. Readers can only be grateful that anyone should take such responsibility.
Remarkable and God-awful.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1707-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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