A restrained yet evocative account of life on the front lines.
A GI Everyman fights his way through Italy, France and Germany in these absorbing World War II memoirs.
From the bloody stalemate at Anzio to the frigid winter fighting along the Rhine and the climactic Allied invasion of Germany, Brown, an American infantryman in charge of a machine-gun squad, saw as much of the war in Europe as anyone did. His episodic reminiscences paint a vivid picture of an ordinary soldier’s travails. The author recounts scenes of misery and terror as he shivers in a foxhole filled with stinking water while shells whistle overhead, plays cat-and-mouse with an enemy patrol that has him pinned down with machine-gun fire and cowers in a bomb crater while a German tank looms overhead. There are also exhilarating spectacles as he watches American bombers flying through storms of flak, a warm interlude with French peasants, a hair-raising encounter with Army dentistry and a generous sampling of bawdy GI poetry. There are magnetic commanders who sacrifice themselves for their men as well as arrogant officers, greener than the soldiers they give orders to, who waste lives through incompetence. And there is horror when a maimed German prisoner blows himself up with a grenade to end his pain, and quiet anguish when the author spends Christmas Eve sitting in a room with a dying comrade. Although given to occasional flights of soldierly sentimentality, Brown’s prose is usually as straightforward and matter-of-fact as an after-action report. Still imbued with a staff sergeant’s professionalism, he pens lucid combat narratives—photos, maps and diagrams help clarify the action—and engrossing disquisitions on everything from the shortcomings of American bazookas to the fiendish cunning of German mines and booby traps. The pathos he conveys is all the more moving because it emerges on its own from his clear-eyed depiction of the business of war.
A restrained yet evocative account of life on the front lines.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456853969
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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