A moving volume suffused with pain, hope and bravery.
A bittersweet chronicle about caretaking for the nonlethal casualties of war.
As a dedicated physical therapist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Levine rehabilitated scores of American soldiers (predominantly men in their early 20s) deployed to and returning from war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan. Her memoir is comprised of vignettes chronicling the diligent work required to make the facility function and, more importantly, about the patients who filled its rooms with war stories and poignant personal histories, from the heartbreaking to the humor-laced. After a six-year tenure, Levine knowledgeably describes the cramped, fishbowllike “glassed-in gym” housing more than 100 patients at a time (all viewable by inquisitive tour groups) in the amputee unit where she and other therapists helped soldiers convalesce. She also outlines the finesse of amputations and prosthetics and allows a glimpse into her personal life as a single lesbian. Throughout her affable narrative, Levine celebrates the facility’s long history as the Army’s flagship medical center, yet her focus remains on the patient-care experience and the interactive camaraderie that is such an integral component to a soldier’s recovery. Among the more colorful characters are co-worker Jim, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who was also a compulsive baker and fledgling marathoner; a paranoid fellow physical therapist nicknamed “Major Crazy”; a prosthetist dubbed “Big Sexy”; and Walter, the unit’s service dog. However, emerging as the centerpiece of the collection is Cosmo, a defiant, foulmouthed, 22-year-old infantry soldier who was admitted with one leg blown off; he eventually became a double-amputee Levine describes as a man virtually “cut in half.” Ultimately, while her job is to physically restore these servicemen, it is seeing smiles of contentment or a long-awaited discharge that “makes the long hours and the physicality of our work worth it.”
A moving volume suffused with pain, hope and bravery.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-58333-539-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Avery
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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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