A fitting memorial to the farmboy turned soldier and intellectual: a must for Civil War enthusiasts.
The Civil War as seen by the author’s great-grandfather, an Illinois infantryman on the Union side.
Bobrick (Wide as the Waters, 2001, etc.) bases his account largely on 90 letters Benjamin “Webb” Baker (1841–1908) wrote home between August 1861, when he responded to Lincoln’s call for volunteers, and June 1864, when he joined Sherman’s march across Georgia. At the war’s onset, Webb was a 19-year-old farmboy, used to hard work and outdoor living. His company was sent to Missouri, where southern sympathizers threatened Union control of the state. He first saw action in the Union victory at Pea Ridge, the largest battle of the war west of the Mississippi. He was twice wounded. Then, after a period of patrolling the Missouri-Arkansas border, his company crossed the river and served in Kentucky and Mississippi before settling in Tennessee. A long series of aimless marches and idle days in camp nearly drove Baker to distraction, until they went east to fight for Chattanooga in the battles of Chickamauga and Lookout Mountain. He suffered another major wound, and worse yet, the death of his younger brother, who had enlisted several months after he did. Bobrick alternates between descriptions of the conflict as Baker experienced it and as it was fought in the country as a whole. The letters give a detailed view of war as seen by an ordinary soldier; readers can sense how Baker was sobered by battle and by the extensive reading he did while recovering from his wounds. After the war, he earned a doctorate in history and became a teacher and a minister. The last section reprints the original letters, some summarized by the transcriber who prepared a typescript after Baker’s death.
A fitting memorial to the farmboy turned soldier and intellectual: a must for Civil War enthusiasts.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-5091-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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