Rough-around-the-edges tale that achieves an authenticity more polished authors struggle to duplicate.
An unwelcome tour of duty inspires this garbled but genuine chronicle of a soldier during the Gulf War.
At the time of Iraq’s fateful invasion of Kuwait, Eash was only 19 years old and unwittingly on the brink of a bizarre coming-of-age when he is called to war. Whether recounting tales of chasing women South of the Border from his Texas base or reminiscing about epic scorpion-versus-beetle battles in the Saudi Arabian desert, the youth and inexperience of the author and his fellow Army recruits is tragically clear throughout the narrative. Despite being couched in a grammatical minefield, Eash’s account becomes an unselfconscious Everyman’s portrait of the war. Without the pretensions of a hero’s tale or intellectual jabs at the absurdity of human conflict, he fills his story with authentic details: hole-digging competitions to pass time in the desert, punishments meted out for leaving his post (even to aid a crashed helicopter) and uneasiness around the international media covering his battalion’s first entry into Iraq. The emotions, if ineloquently stated, are raw and run the gamut of rage: anger at being separated from his new wife, horror of his first killings and frustration over Iraq’s unwillingness to negotiate. Eash is flooded with relief upon learning he will go home, but it’s a comfort shot through with incredulity that the U.S. government would denounce Saddam Hussein’s atrocities but leave the dictator in power. To appreciate this soldier’s story, the reader needs to turn a blind eye to the glaring flaws in his writing. Not a page goes by without tangents rife with distrust of the military’s top brass, platitudes, trite life advice or political diatribes (Eash makes no secret of his anti-illegal immigration and pro-legalized marijuana platform). But the rhetorical style, however inexpert, opens a window into a segment of American society often dramatized by the press, romanticized by politicians or demonized by pacifists that rarely finds its own voice.
Rough-around-the-edges tale that achieves an authenticity more polished authors struggle to duplicate.Pub Date: July 10, 2006
ISBN: 978-1-84728-202-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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