An impressive and eloquent account of a soldier’s life and culture.
An American Army veteran’s memoir of his experiences in the European theatre of World War II.
This excellent memoir details the author’s life as a dogface in the Third Infantry Division of the U.S. Army. Starting his career on March 12, 1943, with the war already in full swing, the young Brown recounts his basic training exploits in an almost halcyon tone. This lack of pretension or existential dread will surprise many readers weaned on Vietnam-era satire and the first 40 minutes of Full Metal Jacket. Brown delivers his choice experiences matter-of-factly and makes no apologies for doing so. However, into these sunny memories Brown deftly weaves the telling wisps of death. When digging an ominously measured 6x6x6-foot hole in the ground as punishment during training, Brown discovers a small cache of ordinance. After Brown finds a stray grenade, his commanding officer orders him to dig more and see what else is there. It’s a perfect image with the young untested man already digging a grave-like hole and discovering the dangers of war can be found even in South Carolina. This subtle style advances forth as Brown’s company learns proper grenade throwing technique; a flub during training results in nothing more than a few nervous seconds, but without overt exposition, it’s understood that it might have been his first experience with a casualty of war. Brown moves the reader brusquely to Italy and here the war proper begins. The grind and anxiety of guard duty, and in perhaps the most intense and confessional moment, Brown reluctantly describes one of the few nagging dreams he still has that’s inspired by the war. It’s about as gory as he gets in the memoir and also as honest, which gives the narrative an incredible dimension. Throughout the memoir, Brown explains that the charge of his book comes from the many children of veterans looking for information about their very reticent fathers. So here is an honest and articulate summary of experience that can’t be so easily explored by the calcified clichés of popular culture. Brown admits his generation is in its twilight, and so these chronicles are more important and rewarding than ever.
An impressive and eloquent account of a soldier’s life and culture.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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