A gripping memoir combined with an uneven legal and political analysis.
A writer recounts his objection to West Point academy rules that violated his religious freedom and explores the evolving nature of the American Dream.
Debut author Vaught grew up in the Bible Belt on a small farm in a family enthralled by the example of his father, Harry, who weathered the Depression’s terrible deprivations and served bravely in World War II. Thanks to his Baptist upbringing—his father was a deacon—Vaught was shown how genuine religious devotion and a healthy tolerance for the divergent beliefs of others could be reconciled. Much to the chagrin of the author’s own mother, Harry supported John F. Kennedy for president despite rampant anti–Roman Catholic sentiments among American Protestants. Meanwhile, Vaught fell in love with the adventure of aviation—he earned a private flying license by age 17—and matriculated to West Point in 1965. But he wasn’t prepared for the academy’s emphasis on relentless competition, draconian rules, and a “total and confining existence.” He found it to be a “pernicious environment,” and finally took a stand against West Point’s compulsory chapel service attendance and forced religious donations, demands he believed infringed on his constitutional rights. In soaring language, he explains his principal complaints: “This was not the American Dream. It was coercion and abuse of power. It stepped back toward the unification of church and state that existed for centuries in Europe. It ignored the breakthroughs toward religious freedom achieved in the American Revolution. It corrupted the ideals that made us free.” The author recollects his intransigent pursuit of the issue, including testifying in court twice, and the “pure retaliation” he suffered in the Army as a result. Vaught’s intriguing memoir is a wide-ranging one that includes a meditation on the value of an authentic religious pluralism, the tension between his spiritual beliefs and the grim reality of war, and the fluctuating meaning of the American Dream. At the heart of that dream, the author contends, is a religious freedom that seems to form the basis for independent thought itself: “Full religious freedom, not just religious tolerance, leads to freedom of thought, as well as the acceptance of the different religions or ideas of others. It implies listening, self-reliance and the freedom to think, along with freedom from the hierarchy of the aristocracy and their organized official religion.” This isn’t the first instance in the book wherein he likens the upper echelons of the military to an aristocracy. In another place, he compares the military brass more specifically to the “aristocracy of medieval Europe,” a peculiar exaggeration that raises questions about the author’s knowledge of the history of aristocracies. In addition, readers should not expect a rigorous legal analysis of the First Amendment. But Vaught still furnishes a rich and compelling account of his own radicalization from a “farm boy wanting to fly airplanes” to a “dissenting political actor.”
A gripping memoir combined with an uneven legal and political analysis.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-72832-664-1
Page Count: 236
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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