Readers of Bowden’s work are assured of honest, straightforward, painstakingly researched essays.
Collected magazine articles and essays by wide-ranging journalist Bowden (Writer in Residence/Univ. of Delaware; The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden, 2012, etc.).
Divided into categories familiar to the author’s readers, his deeply researched work on war, profiles of prominent, interesting people and sports personalities, and a variety of general interest essays (e.g., his wacky experiment with guinea hens) represent fine examples of contemporary journalism, as the author himself looks to his investigative models such as Nellie Bly, Ida Tarbell, and John Hersey. The most probing essay is the lengthy title article, first published in 2011 in Vanity Fair, which tracks the fallout from the single most violent day’s battle in the Afghanistan War, July 13, 2008, during which nine American soldiers were killed in action in Wanat. Bowden looks deeply into a very painful, complicated episode for the U.S. Army, which was blamed for the death of Lt. Jonathan Brostrom by his father, a retired army colonel who accused the leadership of putting the men in needless danger at Wanat. Yet while the author expresses compassion for the father’s pain, he also ascertains the many facets to the story, which underscore that the officers were doing exactly what they were trained to do. In “The Last Ace,” published in the Atlantic in 2009, Bowden explores the changing nature of America’s fighter pilots, reflecting the swift advances in air power. In “The Killing Machines” (2013), also published in the Atlantic, the author delves into the morally complex history of the use of drones. Some of the detailed character profiles include those of Vice President Joe Biden, Korean dictator Kim Jung Un, New York Times publisher and chairman Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., and extraordinary lawyer Judy Clarke, who manages to keep the worst killers in America (Ted Kaczynski, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Zacarias Moussaoui, and others) from getting the death sentence.
Readers of Bowden’s work are assured of honest, straightforward, painstakingly researched essays.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2411-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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