An absorbing memoir of the Danish-born author's WW II experiences with the American military, which obviously provided a starting point for the many thrillers he later wrote as a civilian (Code Name: Grand Guignol, 1987, etc.). When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Melchior was working as a stage manager at Radio City Music Hall. Having already decided to become a US citizen, the multilingual author volunteered his services to the armed forces. Melchior, then 24, was rigorously trained by the OSS and subsequently assigned to the Army's Counterintelligence Corps. He eventually spent two years in the ETO, advancing with Allied troops from Normandy through France, Luxembourg (during the Battle of the Bulge), and Germany as far as the Czechoslovakian border. In the course of an eventful tour, the author proved cunning as well as effective in his pursuit of collaborators, high-ranking Nazis, saboteurs, spies, war criminals, etc. While much of his work as a field investigator was routine (e.g., screening displaced persons, discharged soldiers, undocumented travelers, or local pols whose backgrounds qualified them for office in the interim governments established by the American military), he was a party to a full ration of dramatic moments. Among other accomplishments, he and fellow operatives uncovered a band of so-called Werewolves (Wehrmacht fanatics left behind the lines to engage in terrorist acts against the populist and invasion forces). He also helped unearth stolen art treasures and caches of contraband weapons while unmasking any number of SS personnel (subject to mandatory arrest) who posed as refugees to evade capture. In 1990, Melchior and his wife retraced the route he took through Europe when it was being liberated. His brief account of this sentimental journey adds considerable resonance to a narrative already rich in anecdotal detail and high adventure. (Illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-89141-444-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Presidio/Random
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
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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