Any reader who wonders about the significance of such a mission will have no reservations by the end of this...
The journalist’s reporting is impressive, but the storytelling is what distinguishes this account of identifying the remains of military casualties decades after they died in war.
As national security reporter for the Boston Globe, Bender has covered recent conflicts in the Middle East and Asia. Here, the author tells the parallel stories of two young military men, separated by half a century but intertwined with the narrative momentum of a compelling mystery and the depth of character of a rich novel. Ryan McCown was a World War II Marine pilot, an archetypal Southern gentleman from Charleston, S.C. When he and others failed to return from a mission, his fate was unknown; he was presumed dead, though there was talk that he was missing or had been taken prisoner. Flash forward to the late 20th century, and McCown’s story alternates with that of George Eyster V, the only son in a family with a long military legacy but felt unsuited to follow, who preferred to exert himself as a lacrosse star and go drinking with his buddies afterward: “There were too many things about the Army he found unappealing—the rootless existence, the need to constantly follow orders and bow to authority, and, yes, the prospect of real danger. It was an honorable calling, he knew, just not for him.” The author humanizes the stories of both men, putting them in the context of their families, their romances, the novels they read and the poetry they wrote. Ultimately, Eyster resolved his ambivalence about the military through a mandate that involved using advances in forensic science to identify the remains of soldiers from battles before he was born and to bring them home. Instead of being “prepared to inflict as much damage as possible on America’s enemies,” he could help with “putting things back together again.”
Any reader who wonders about the significance of such a mission will have no reservations by the end of this well-structured, well-written book.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-0385535175
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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