A memoir by a WAC (Women’s Army Corps) enlistee, combining high adventure with “lots of fun and travel,” but paid for with some sad, painful experiences. Miller, then a patriotic and daring young teacher in Iowa, wanted to contribute directly to the effort of WWII (her father had served proudly in WWI) by joining the newly formed Women’s Army that would help to relieve more young men for combat duty. She endured the long, exhausting hours of basic training, but some of the worst (and best) was yet to come. Miller was trained as a cryptographer and transcribd secret coded orders and intelligence for the US Eighth Air Force headquarters in London while the air offensive was raging in Europe. At this time, V1 and V2 buzz bombs were falling in Britain. After D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge erupted, she was transferred to the US Ninth Air Force in Charleroi, Belgium. Here she witnessed the endless suffering of European refugees who had lost everything, knew the hardships of freezing weather, poor food and shelter, and tremendous stress, as well as the potential danger of German counterattacks. She also went to see the mass graves at Dachau. The book relates sightseeing trips, too, including a visit to Paris after the German surrender. At the end Miller writes that there were so many heroes and there was so much pain, that the ghosts of more than half a century ago still haunt many today. Despite the vital contributions of the 300,000 WACs, Miller complains about feeling like a second-class member of the army, receiving little recognition for her service. The well-told story of a seldom reported facet of WWII. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8071-2343-9
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
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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