A complement to the memoirs of George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, as well as Javier Cercas’s novel Soldiers of Salamis...
Fluent memoir by a veteran of a war that ended 70 years ago and is swiftly being forgotten.
Born in New Orleans in 1905, Neugass was a man adrift, a published poet who studied mining engineering, archaeology and history at several schools without a degree, then worked for a newspaper in France before returning to the United States, where he worked as a cook, shoe salesman and janitor. In 1937, he volunteered for service in Spain, driving an ambulance through some of the worst fighting of the war. He died of a heart attack in 1949, just after Harper & Brothers accepted his novel Rain of Ashes for publication. It is clear from these pages, edited by Carroll (The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1994) and Glazer (Theater, Dance and Performance Studies/Univ. of California, Berkeley)—both associated with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, which focus on a unit of American socialists and communists who fought for the Spanish Republican government—that Neugass was both a capable writer and a somewhat doctrinaire leftist (“I was unable to enjoy the dancing although, out of a sense of political duty, I danced with Pepita, the ugliest and most carefully gotten-up of the Villa Paz chicas”). Neugass writes carefully of the soldiers with whom he served, such as a Finnish driver who habitually called Francisco Franco a “shon of a bits” and another ambulance crew that kept the dried head of a dead enemy as a kind of mascot. He also has a sense of the bigger picture, of Spain as a proxy war fought between the Axis powers and the Soviet Union. Sometimes telegraphic (“Fascists have big feet. Killed three, five, eight of them. One with knife, others with bombs. At night. May have to kill more.”), sometimes lyrical, Neugass depicts war from a worm’s-eye view. It is most certainly not pretty, but occasionally humorous.
A complement to the memoirs of George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, as well as Javier Cercas’s novel Soldiers of Salamis (2004)—not quite in their league, but not far from it.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59558-427-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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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