An absolutely compelling war memoir marked by the author’s incredible strength of character and vulnerability.
A devastating memoir of a woman’s experiences in Iraq that ultimately reflects how “there is no real end to war, only the absence of it, a lull in the fighting, a time during which another generation is born for the kill.”
At the age of 19, King (It’s My Country Too: Women’s Military Stories from the American Revolution in Afghanistan, 2017, etc.) was deployed to Iraq as a “wheel-vehicle mechanic,” which required her to recover vehicles rendered inoperable due to mechanical issues often caused by enemy fire. However, sometimes she also had to salvage the body parts of fellow soldiers who had been killed in those vehicles. “We were told every soldier gets a black bag and every piece of flesh, bone, or body part not connected to a full body was to have its own separate bag,” she writes. As a sergeant explained, “there is no certainty that the leg lying near one body is actually that body’s leg. It’s not your job to figure that shit out. It’s your job to clean it up.” Throughout her deployment she saw soldiers inured to the violence and death, and she tried to be detached and courageous even when she was thrown for a loop by mortar fire that left a fragment of shrapnel in her shin. Impressively, King coolly relates the countless horrors she witnessed. Readers who don’t know certain elements of war jargon—Strykers, nametape defilade, BOHICA, etc.—should consult a dictionary or the internet; this immediate narrative has little room for such explanations. As if her nightmarish experiences in the war weren’t difficult enough, she relates the equally arduous challenge of returning home pregnant with twins and suffering from and denying PTSD. Throughout, King’s descriptions are graphic, clear, and frightening to read.
An absolutely compelling war memoir marked by the author’s incredible strength of character and vulnerability.Pub Date: March 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64012-118-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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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