Hunter’s prose is wooden, his experiences rather formulaic, but he offers singular glimpses of the Iraqis’ harsh,...
A British Royal Logistic Corps captain shares his experiences of front-line service in Iraq.
Trained in IRA and Colombian FARC tactics of bomb construction, 31-year-old Hunter shipped out to Iraq in 2004 for a 101-day tour disposing of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and rooting out bomber teams. Despite his disgruntled wife (she wanted him back home in Oxfordshire) and two small daughters, Hunter admits that after 13 years on the job he still found its dangers and risks exhilarating. That may not be the adjective that comes to readers’ minds as they peruse his narrative, written as a present-tense diary of his tour of duty. IEDs created havoc for the troops in some 2,000 attacks a month, and sniffing out insurgents and their homemade bombs in a country where Westerners were angrily resented was perilous and extremely dicey work. Soldiers were both witting and unwitting provokers of disaster. Hunter saw a husband give his pregnant wife a severe beating after her burqa slipped and the British gazed at her face. He did nothing, he later explained to his men, because he’d heard about what happened when some fellow soldiers retaliated against a man who had beaten his 11-year-old daughter—the father cut her throat “to save his honor.” Neutralizing banks of explosives was a punishing, thankless task, and Hunter was frequently plagued by guilt and sadness about the violence he and the Americans inflicted. Eventually, he had to say goodbye to the other blokes (lots of jocular Briticisms here); he was promoted to major and got a desk job as a staff officer, leaving the situation in Iraq much the same as when he arrived. Ponderous platitudes from Gandhi to Gilda Radner form epigraphs to each chapter but don’t add much gravitas.
Hunter’s prose is wooden, his experiences rather formulaic, but he offers singular glimpses of the Iraqis’ harsh, hardscrabble lives.Pub Date: May 6, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-553-80683-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
