Military buffs will give this high marks; general readers may find it hard to relate to the author’s relentlessly macho...
Memoirs from members of Special Forces tend to mix combat fireworks with a leavening of modesty, but O’Neal, writing with veteran co-author Fisher (with Tom Coughlin: Earn the Right to Win, 2013, etc.), dispenses with the modesty at no great cost.
True to the traditions of the genre, the author passed a miserable childhood. At 15, he stole his cousin’s birth certificate and enlisted in the Army. Sent to Vietnam in 1967, he found his calling and fought enthusiastically until his deception came to light. Discharged, he re-enlisted under his real name, repeated his training, returned to Vietnam and soon joined the elite Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol units. After two years of grueling patrols and battles, he returned to the United States and Ranger School in 1971. With the war winding down, O’Neal served on elite parachuting teams and taught hand-to-hand combat before joining America’s first anti-terror unit. Yearning for action, he left the Army to train troops for Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, who was fighting Sandinista guerrillas. This produced action but ended disastrously in the death of O’Neal’s family, with O’Neal himself barely surviving capture and torture. In 1981, he returned to the Army to help organize its Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School. After retiring, he continued to train Special Forces in his aggressive techniques. His personal life was less happy. He undoubtedly suffered a chronic post-traumatic stress disorder and often abused drugs both for PTSD and the pain of his many injuries.
Military buffs will give this high marks; general readers may find it hard to relate to the author’s relentlessly macho ethos, but they will find it hard not to admire his fierce dedication.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-00432-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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