Riveting, authentic scenes from war-torn countries stand out in this addiction account.
A debut memoir traces a veteran’s many years of addiction, detailing extraordinary and disturbing events in Africa and Vietnam and his long recovery in West Virginia.
Calling himself “a true son of Appalachia,” Talbott grew up in a small West Virginia town and was continuously perplexed by Christianity and his innate desire to live “outside the box.” As the country plunged into major social change at the end of the 1950s, the author discovered the buzz of whiskey and beer in high school. He then joined the newly founded Peace Corps and moved to Berbera, Somalia, to work with local schoolchildren. Along with plenty of humorous adventures involving cultural misunderstandings, camels, and small monkeys, it was there that he had his first encounter with true violence: bandit raids on trains and the outbreak of war in nearby Yemen against British colonists. He continued to be thrown into horrors after enlisting in the Army and finding himself in Vietnam, where he drank warm beer while rockets and mortars exploded around him (“Only a true addict could do that”). After his tour, Talbott started a family and threw himself into a career in academia in West Virginia. But he also spent 16 years drinking until he passed out every night to escape the PTSD he didn’t even realize he was experiencing. The final third of the memoir delves into his eventual recovery, recounting each of the difficult 12 steps. The book offers a familiar narrative reminiscent of Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life, but Talbott brings a measured, multifaceted analysis to his recovery, examining the importance of a God not necessarily defined by religion. It’s with this same exacting eye that the author revisits the unfamiliar, intriguing, and harrowing moments of his life. He draws parallels between the superstitious rumors running amok in Somalian villages and the fake news of today’s social media, describes seeing people in Vietnam trapped naked in tiny bamboo cages, and carefully considers the guilt he has carried with him since returning home from war and its impact on his worldview.
Riveting, authentic scenes from war-torn countries stand out in this addiction account.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982232-92-4
Page Count: 266
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
