Witty, insightful, scathing, appalling and inspiring—a must-read book on the Iraq war.
A former Naval officer examines his time as a member of an energy task force in Baghdad.
Brownfield, a U.S. Naval Academy grad, began his service as a submarine officer. Highly idealistic, he resisted the compromises most new officers made—specifically, cheating on the exams required to certify his competence to run a nuclear reactor. Watching his captain run the sub aground, he learned to distrust the default assumption that maintaining authority is more important than being right. He was ready to leave the Navy for grad school at Yale when, in the aftermath of 9/11, he signed up for service in Iraq. His mission was to help coordinate military and civilian responses to the country’s energy shortages. He quickly found that most of his superiors were merely marking time, doing their best not to shake up the status quo. Brownfield’s major assignment was reading the text of PowerPoint presentations to commanding Gen. George Casey. None of his immediate team showed the least interest in doing anything to improve the ability of average Iraqis to get electricity. Their major contact in the local government received constant death threats, and the author’s superior, a fellow submariner, made empty promises but did nothing practical to help the man. Others were openly cynical in their reasons for being there or just collecting the higher pay for serving in a combat zone. Brownfield, still idealistic, tried to find ways to make a difference. He developed a method to transport heavy diesel engines to their intended destination, only to be blocked by a local official who saw no political advantage in letting them through. A plan to issue millions of compact fluorescent bulbs to Iraqis to save on energy costs was stalled until Gen. David Petraeus came on board—but even with his approval, it remains incomplete. Brownfield left Iraq convinced that energy independence, the professed goal, was in fact a false ideal; instead, he sees “sustainable interdependence” as the only mature approach to solving the world’s energy problems.
Witty, insightful, scathing, appalling and inspiring—a must-read book on the Iraq war.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-27169-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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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