by Marion E. Carl with Barrett Tillman ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1994
A blunt, spare autobiography from a past president of the American Fighter Aces Association. Carl neither minces nor wastes words in recalling a distinguished career as a US Marine Corps aviator, which began immediately after his 1938 graduation from Oregon State and ended 35 years later when he retired with the rank of major general. Having earned his wings in 1939, the author (now 78) was an early- bird arrival in WW II's Pacific theater. Flying F4F Wildcats in the unfriendly skies above Midway and Guadalcanal, he downed 16 Japanese planes. Sent stateside to be showcased as the USMC's first ace, Carl wooed and won his wife (then a Powers model). He survived a second tour in the Solomons, adding two more kills to his victory total, and ended the war as a test pilot. Adapting easily to the jet age, the author set a variety of altitude and speed records that (though long since broken) attest to his willingness to push the envelope, i.e., take experimental aircraft (and, it would seem, his own convictions) to, even beyond, their theoretical limits. He led photoreconnaissance flights over Red China in the mid-1950s and logged more than 100 missions in Vietnam. In the course of his lengthy service, Carl met and took the measure of many notables. While he remembers Joe Foss, Melvin Laird, Charles Lindbergh, and a host of lesser lights with fondness, the author has precious little use for Greg (Pappy) Boyington (of Black Sheep Squadron fame), Jacqueline Cochrane, LBJ, Ted Kennedy, Robert McNamara, and John Wayne. In a series of parting shots, moreover, he offers considered, if politically incorrect, pronouncements on gun control, the handling of the Tailhook sex scandal, women in combat, and other touchy issues. The dead-honest memoir of an accomplished military professional. The forthright text has 13 contemporary photos.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55750-116-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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