A gripping and often charming wartime story.
An autobiographical novel about an American medic’s experiences in World War II.
Paul Kramer grows up in Dorchester, a neighborhood of Boston, and in 1943, at age 18, enlists in the U.S. Army. He’s shuttled to Virginia’s Camp Pickett for basic medic training, where he’s shocked by the brazenly contemptuous enforcement of racial segregation. Although he struggles with the food during training—he’s Jewish and strictly observes kosher dietary restrictions—he distinguishes himself enough to be sent to medical and surgical technicians’ school at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indianapolis for an intensive 10-week course. He then travels to Scotland by ship through waters populated by German submarines, and he’s later sent to England. After discovering a black-market operation within the ranks, he’s assigned to a military police battalion and given combat instruction by British Special Forces. He’s eventually sent to France and hand-picked for a clandestine reconnaissance mission with French Resistance fighters. His experiences abroad are remarkably eventful—he meets generals George S. Patton and Dwight D. Eisenhower, plays jazz piano for British aristocrats, and is serenaded by singer Dinah Shore. Kramer’s military career is also notably honorable: he participates in a mission to save a captured colonel and later gets a Purple Heart. Debut author Kozol says that he wrote this book as a personal memoir but changed some names to protect the anonymity of many of the people he knew. However, the story is told in the third person, his own name is changed to “Paul Kramer,” and the reasons for these unusual authorial decisions are never made clear—or even remarked upon. The book also episodically reflects on the protagonist’s childhood and his life after the war—he becomes an optometrist—but its best moments are in its tales of war abroad, which are consistently engrossing throughout. The prose style is clear, if unremarkable, and the author appears to excise some of the grittier aspects of his experience, including expletives, which makes the work as a whole feel bowdlerized at times. That said, the story itself is as good as anything a novelist could conjure from his or her imagination.
A gripping and often charming wartime story.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4808-4303-5
Page Count: 545
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
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
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