A gut-wrenching memoir of love unexpectedly eviscerated.
In spare, poignant prose, New York Times assistant national news editor Canedy bares the human cost of the Iraq war.
An independent woman skeptical of marriage, the author found herself at age 33 falling in love with First Sgt. Charles King, “a gentle soul [whose] heart was as big as his biceps.” It was 1998, and Canedy, the daughter of a former drill sergeant, had never wanted to be a military wife who planned her career around her husband’s tours of duty. She was initially conflicted about her feelings for the physically imposing yet modest King, a commanding leader who was also a tender artist who drew portraits of angels. Canedy slowly succumbed to his charms, and by the time King left for Iraq in December 2005, she was five months pregnant and they were engaged. The sergeant had already begun writing a journal for his unborn son, Jordan, who was six months old when King was killed in Iraq, one month before he was to return to his family. Addressed to their son, Canedy’s narrative seeks to capture his father’s essence for him. It includes excerpts from King’s journal, which reveal the soul of a beautiful and decent man. “Always share your gifts with others,” he advises Jordan. “Laughter is great medicine for the soul,” and “sometimes you get lucky and catch a rainbow.” King put his military duty above family, refusing to take leave to attend his son’s birth. Taunted by a commanding officer, he knowingly participated in the recklessly unsafe final mission that killed him because he felt obligated to undergo the same risks as his soldiers. Canedy honestly describes her anger at his death; robbed of her future family life, she felt “agony, so raw that even breathing hurts.”
A gut-wrenching memoir of love unexpectedly eviscerated.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-39579-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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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