This memoir—by the general brought in to enable Yeltsin to win the last election—is thoughtful and clear-eyed on military matters, but on politics it sounds like the officers' mess after midnight. The bulk of the book is devoted to Lebed's military career, and this makes much of it surprisingly good, particularly where he deals with Afghanistan. It is also characterized by a sardonic wit. He notes that he never heard the textbook order to ``charge'': ``In real battle, people are commanded chiefly through profanity.'' Referring to the muddy conditions, he writes that a ``bigger clod was a vehicle; a smaller clod was a man.'' Lebed is just to his enemies: The Afghans ``were warriors of the first order''; and when Colin Powell visited his division and Lebed was ordered by the minister of defense, over his protests, to conduct a parachute demonstration in dangerous conditions (as a result of which one paratrooper was killed and many injured), Lebed found ``unbearably shameful'' Powell's repeated question, ``What are you doing?'' He is disappointing on recent history, in part because of his outspoken contempt for politicians and democracy, and in part because he simply fails to deal with the events. He tells us almost nothing of his campaign for the presidency, or his negotiations with Yeltsin, or his successful peace talks with the Chechens. Too much of it is rhetoric rather than thought: ``Brother Slavs . . . in trading totalitarianism for democracy, haven't we just traded one bad thing for another?'' Nor are his suggestions persuasive: While noting that Russia is going through ``an economic, social, political, and moral crisis,'' he weakly suggests putting aside all arguments as to which system suits Russia best—socialism or capitalism—until better times. Lebed reveals himself to be an ``army hard-ass'' who is actually sensitive on army matters and only asinine on political ones.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-89526-422-6
Page Count: 250
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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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