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
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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