This account of a search for a father's past is deftly done, avoiding the pitfalls of self-righteousness and paternal aggrandizement. GQ correspondent Richmond (Ballpark, 1993) set out a few years ago to learn about his father's war experiences. Tom Richmond, who died in a plane crash in 1960 when his son was seven years old, was a Marine officer who fought in three savage battles in the Pacific in WW II. He was one of only 74 Marines in that war who were awarded two silver stars. After starting a family of his own, Richmond felt compelled to find out firsthand what his father went through a half-century ago. ``If I were to die knowing nothing about the battles, the truth and horror and beauty of Guadalcanal, New Britain, and Peleliu would have been lost to two generations: mine and my son's.'' So he devoured books on the Pacific war, combed the official Marine records, interviewed many of his father's fellow Marines, and made two trips to the Pacific to visit battlefields. Richmond tells his story well, using an effective mixture of war reporting and personal reflection. His most affecting writing comes in the sections where he describes literally walking in his father's footsteps. This is tricky terrain, but Richmond resists the temptation to idealize his father, offering instead some evocative reporting, spiced with frank, thoughtful ideas about his father's character and legacy and the impact they continue to have on his own life. In the end, Richmond frees himself from the burden of being a hero's son. ``I am relinquishing my father the ideal, and coming to terms with my father the man, and allowing myself, finally—much later than most of the people I know—to let go of him.'' (For a full account of the war in the Pacific, see Eric Bergerud, Touched with Fire, p. XXX.) An accomplished work that recreates the horrors of the Pacific in WW II and honors the Americans who fought there.
Pub Date: June 19, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80040-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
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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