An intense, fierce woman generously shares her instructive experiences as a Marine and how her service time turned her into...
How the challenging, complex world of the Marines turned a woman into an activist.
After graduating with honors from Yale, Bhagwati left her graduate studies at Columbia to join the Marines, a move that shocked her stern Indian parents, both of whom were well-respected economists. In this honest and unflinching memoir, the author briefly chronicles her early years before moving on to share the highs and lows of her time as a Marine. She discusses the brutal physicality of the training and how she pushed herself as far as she could in order to excel at every level. She often outcompeted the men in her unit and loved the strength she found deep inside herself. Bhagwati also bares the details of the sexual harassment she and other female Marines experienced, a situation that was—and still is—commonplace in many areas of the armed forces. When she left the Marines, she realized her career had left invisible yet permanent scars; she suffered from depression, low self-esteem, and a lack of sexual desire, among other ailments. Like other veterans, she turned to the VA for support, where she received mixed results. This led Bhagwati to start the Service Women’s Action Network, which advocates for military sexual harassment victims, and she also helped change some government policies regarding women serving in combat roles. Running throughout the narrative is the author’s palpable sense of confusion, dismay, and anger at the way women are treated in the military, particularly in the predominantly male domain of the Marines, and how these feelings affected her life as a civilian. Her candid story pulls back the curtain on a hidden world in which highly capable women who thrive on the challenge of being a soldier are hindered by the men who surround them.
An intense, fierce woman generously shares her instructive experiences as a Marine and how her service time turned her into an activist for women’s rights in the military.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6254-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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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