Delgado brings an intriguing perspective to a complicated situation, but these notes could use polishing.
A veteran who was honorably discharged as a conscientious objector lays out a case against the Iraq war.
After a peripatetic childhood as the son of an American diplomat in Thailand, Senegal and Egypt, the introverted and inherently contrarian Delgado moved with his parents to Florida. He attended college briefly, but dropped out to join the Army Reserves as a way of spiting the pseudo-intellectual elitism he found on campus. Waiting to be called to active duty, he finally cracked open some assigned reading on Buddhism and in one sitting decided, “I’ve been a Buddhist for a long time.” Deployed to Iraq, Delgado eventually concluded that a vegetarian Buddhist could not be a U.S. soldier. An impressive combination of research, relentlessness and steadfastness won him a conscientious-objector discharge. While the cynical or jingoistic may read self-justification into his account of the war, Delgado’s portrait of a morally unmoored military is peppered with anecdotes about anti-Muslim sentiment and casual violence against civilians that ring true. A lack of exposure to other cultures and languages renders American soldiers unable to recognize our shared humanity, he argues. Combined with a military culture that encourages viewing all Arabs as enemies and provides neither adequate supervision nor proper preparation, this blindness makes horrors like Abu Ghraib inevitable. Delgado’s points are effective. However, his inward-looking narrative only fitfully conveys a wider sense of the war. It’s also confusing: The author uneasily juxtaposes you-are-here action scenes with flashbacks of seeing monks in Thailand, memories of his girlfriend, explanations of Buddhist philosophy, descriptions of friends from the motor pool and a rough guide to filing conscientious objector paperwork.
Delgado brings an intriguing perspective to a complicated situation, but these notes could use polishing.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7270-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
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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