Will appeal to fans of unapologetically brutal military writing.
Gritty combat memoir by an elite British sniper.
Harrison’s memoir focuses on the technical aspects of high-level gunfighting, as battle-tested during his multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. He opens with a tense encounter in Afghanistan, setting up the shot that would earn a world record for a long-distance kill, then downshifts into recounting his hardscrabble, dreary childhood. Things pick up for Harrison and readers when he signs on at age 16 with the British Household Cavalry. He learned about the ugly realities of war during a posting in the Balkans, where he bore witness to Serbian war crimes, and then a tour of Iraq that “had come close to breaking me.” Instead, in 2006, he pestered his way into sniper school: “I just kept asking—literally for years—until I ground them down.” As in the United States, the training is grueling, yet Harrison persevered, winning top student. His new skills served him well in 2007, he notes, when “I was back for another tour in the shithole that was Iraq.” Promoted to command after his first Afghanistan tour, the author documents frequent ambushes and grisly combat tableaux in both theaters: “There wasn’t much logic or background explained to us. We were like ‘rent-a-muscle.’ ” He notes that a certain coldbloodedness is essential for the sniper: “Due to the magnification of the scope, you do tend to see the person you are about to shoot.” Even after being wounded by an IED, Harrison was returned for combat to Afghanistan. He excels at capturing the nitty-gritty of being an operating high-end combat sniper, ably discussing equipment, optics, shooting theory, and stalking tactics. Seeing the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts through the eyes of a British soldier also helps the book stand out. Otherwise, a sense of the author’s inner life does not really develop beyond the laconic conservatism one might expect.
Will appeal to fans of unapologetically brutal military writing.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08523-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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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