A thoroughly satisfying account of war in the South Pacific packed with fireworks, tragedy and horseplay.
A personal account from the K/3/5 Marine company, made famous in the HBO series The Pacific.
McEnery tells his story in the first person, but military buffs will suspect that popular historian Sloan (Undefeated: American’s Heroic Fight for Bataan and Corregidor, 2012, etc.) transcribed and polished interviews with his 92-year-old subject. Few will object to the result. A poor Brooklyn youth during the Depression, McEnery joined the Marines in 1940. A squad leader two years later, he and his division sailed to the Pacific and Guadalcanal in August 1942 to begin the land campaign against the Japanese. Mostly under the age of 20, with only a rare World War I veteran, and outnumbered, they fought brilliantly. After a year of rest and training, McEnery fought again on New Britain and a few months later in the vicious conquest of Peleliu. Delivering the obligatory nod to political correctness, the author bears no grudge against today’s Japanese but maintains that the soldiers he faced behaved with despicable cruelty. In line with contemporary popular historians, he blames sadistic training and incompetent leadership for the suicidal banzai charges on Guadalcanal. When this failed, commanders adopted an equally fruitless tactic: building fortifications, staying put and fighting to the death. McEnery pays only passing attention to the big picture, emphasizing his personal combat experience, narrow escapes, miseries and amusements between battles, the fate of friends, and the officers he admired and disliked.
A thoroughly satisfying account of war in the South Pacific packed with fireworks, tragedy and horseplay.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5913-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
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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