Certainly not literature, but a serviceable addition to the growing bookshelves on the Iraq War, especially useful to...
A well-intended but clumsily written view of life on the Iraq front from a physician’s point of view.
Hnida, a family doctor in Littleton, Colo., had his foundations shaken by three big events: the mass killings at Columbine High School, the rape of a daughter and the attacks of 9/11. As his memoir opens, “in a classic case of be careful of what you wish for,” he finds himself at age 48 in a ditch somewhere in Iraq being upbraided by a much younger fellow for his general cluelessness and lack of nimbleness: “You’re going to get us all killed unless you get the fuck down and eat some sand, sir.” Assigned to a combat surgery team, Hnida, who portrays himself throughout as something of a sad sack, acquaints readers with the many unpleasant ways of dying that the war has to offer, particularly the body-shredding explosive devices that seemed to lie around every corner. Somewhere along these treacherous roads, the author seems to have conceived the notion that the literary model to follow in relating his story was not Richard Selzer, the surgeon author of Mortal Lessons, but Richard Hooker by way of the TV series he inspired, M*A*S*H. As a result, the view is realistic, gritty and full of black humor, as when his much younger commanding officer offers this greeting: “You sure are one old fucker for this job.” All too often, however, Hnida surrenders to mawkishness and, worst of all, bad puns, seemingly in an effort to be the Patch Adams of Baghdad: “Hi, I’m Dr. Hnida, the former Sister Mary Elizabeth. That’s right, I used to be a nun, but I didn’t want to make a habit of it.”
Certainly not literature, but a serviceable addition to the growing bookshelves on the Iraq War, especially useful to would-be military physicians.Pub Date: April 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9957-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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