For those who find catharsis in the fury of others, this book will be an enlivening read.
The reflections of a patriotic American soldier who was eventually overcome by disillusionment.
Debut author De Veas pens an unusual autobiographical account of his participation in Operation Iraqi Freedom. He presents a series of commentaries on journal entries he composed during his experience as a soldier in the Middle East. Sometimes the author strays from the beaten path of a linear memoir, providing his observations on a wide range of topics—organized religion, the Cannes Film Festival, the Roman Empire, Hooters, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Che Guevara, swelling his account to nearly 500 pages in length. Other times, sections of the narrative are studiously redacted, though it’s not always clear what motivates the self-censorship. In some instances, he provides a shell of a story sans details, which is so confusing he would likely be better off simply excluding it: “The last passage has to do with an item I redacted. I did not give the lieutenant my word about what I would do about a specific incident of which he was a big part, but he thought I did. He wanted to know what I was going to do about reporting a particular situation. He heard what a desperate person always wants to hear when he or she is in a predicament, but he didn’t listen to exactly what I said when he interrogated me.” De Veas is true to the title of the book: He is one angry writer, and his ire animates every page of this book as he inveighs against his peers, his superiors, politicians, foreigners and just about anyone he encounters. The tale opens with his experience of rage and disappointment about his “six-month train up,” or what he often refers to as his “self-imposed jail sentence.” Furious at his prolonged training exercises in advance of deployment to Iraq, the author seethes at what he considers to be a squandering of his soldierly experience and, ultimately, a sign of American decline. He ends the book with a spirited complaint about the anodyne use of the expression “Happy Holidays” in favor of “Merry Christmas” and raises the possibility that other “angry books” may be forthcoming. Future readers have been forewarned.
For those who find catharsis in the fury of others, this book will be an enlivening read.Pub Date: June 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1451538083
Page Count: 480
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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.
