A satisfying stream of travel, training, horseplay and nuts-and-bolts military minutiae along with the usual fireworks.
Another macho memoir of a special-forces badass but with a charming, mildly exotic British overlay.
Following the convention of military memoirs, Maylor, with the assistance of Macklin (My Favourite Teacher, 2011, etc.) describes an aimless youth (bored at school, heavy drinking, etc.) before he found himself after joining the marines in 1992. These were Royal Marine commandos, so readers will encounter the traditional sadistic training regimen designed to select those able to endure extreme pain, exhaustion and humiliation. Peacetime warriors kill few bad guys, but Maylor toured the world, enduring surprisingly grueling exercises from the arctic to the jungle, plus unpleasant tours in Northern Ireland before joining the snipers in 1995; military buffs will enjoy his description of their highly technical instruction. After years with no action in sight, he quit the service, married, returned to his native New Zealand, found earning a living difficult and joined the Australian army, where he repeated sniper training. The book is well past the midpoint when his unit arrives in Afghanistan, but it is worth the wait as the author paints a vivid picture of the experience during which his unit patrolled, fought and sniped with varying degrees of success until it was ambushed in one of the biggest battles involving Australian troops. Sticking to his role as a soldier, Maylor shows mild sympathy for Afghan civilians, no hatred of the Taliban, love for his comrades, satisfaction with his performance and no claim that he was fighting for a noble goal.
A satisfying stream of travel, training, horseplay and nuts-and-bolts military minutiae along with the usual fireworks.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-64541-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
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
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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