A stirring tribute to the supreme sacrifice of American heroes.
A collection of remembrances of New York City firefighters and police officers who died on 9/11 as told by their parents.
Besides the physical devastation wrought by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers in 2001, there was a reverberating emotional toll, especially on the families that lost loved ones. Debut author O’Donnell gathers 10 of those stories here—nine detailing the lives of firefighters and one a police detective. Each chapter provides a concise biography of the fallen, including the details leading up to the fall of the towers, and then explores the grieving aftermath of their families chiefly from the perspective of their parents. Two of the civil servants profiled were brothers—John Vigiano was a firefighter and his younger brother, Joseph, a police detective. Joseph led a life of valor. He was wounded by gunfire three times in a career dotted with commendations. The biographical vignettes cover much more than the professional outlines of their subjects; they reach back into their childhoods and furnish a full account of the kinds of men they were. Firefighter Christopher Pickford took theater classes and wrote plays and spent countless hours writing and playing music. Firefighter Capt. Tommy Haskell was a successful high school athlete and a star on the New York City Fire Department’s football team. Parents of the deceased mourn in strikingly diverse ways. Barbara Hetzel, the mother of firefighter Thomas J. Hetzel, joined a group specifically for grieving parents run by the fire department. Maureen Santora, mother of firefighter Christopher Santora, wrote two children’s books, one about a mother’s unconditional love and another about the horror of the 9/11 attacks. O’Donnell’s research is both journalistically rigorous and brimming with empathy. He’s a New York City firefighter who also responded to the attacks on the twin towers. His prose is always accessible and often affecting, especially when it depicts the profound vocational calling to which all firefighters respond: “One dominant and shared attribute among all the families is the ability to confront loss with grace and dignity—even though, at times, they were encroached upon by the media and others.”
A stirring tribute to the supreme sacrifice of American heroes.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-973604-62-4
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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