A workmanlike, nuts-and-bolt account of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.
A specific, technical study of the U.S. military’s special operations against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in the weeks after 9/11.
Sticking to the record, retired Marine Corps veteran Camp (Battle for the City of the Dead: In the Shadow of the Golden Dome, Najaf, August 2004, 2011, etc.) does not impart judgment to this extraordinary story of the U.S. expulsion of Taliban forces in the space of several weeks after 9/11. Maps, chronology and photos all relay the historian’s sense of meticulous research without heeding stylistic embellishments. Camp paints the grim background by depicting the brutal Soviet invasion of the country in 1979 and the disastrous 10-year occupation, resulting in many dead, billions spent and little gained. Emerging from the squalid refugee camps and supported by Pakistan intelligence, the mujahideen were proud, fearless guerrilla fighters who formed small, mobile units that roamed the countryside laying ambush. They were highly effective over the rugged terrain against the lumbering Soviet juggernaut, and would be again when enlisted by the U.S. against the Taliban. The attacks on 9/11 underscored what the Americans should have seen coming: The Taliban (still supported by Pakistan), militarized by Osama bin Laden, had issued jihad against America, as evidenced by the suicide bomb on the USS Cole in 2000 and other attacks. Camp delves into the Bush Administration’s war machinations led by Donald Rumsfeld, and though the military detail can occasionally become overwhelming, the big events unfurl methodically, climaxing in U.S.-backed Hamid Karzai’s taking of Kandahar, and the pursuit of al-Qaeda troops to the border of Pakistan. Operation Anaconda officially closed in March 2002, before the U.S. turned its attention to Iraq.
A workmanlike, nuts-and-bolt account of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7603-4111-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Zenith
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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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