A complex, potentially alienating writing style clouds this unique war memoir.
Deaton’s (The Death of Maria Chavarria, 2012) Vietnam memoir offers medical narratives amid the complexities of war.
In 1967, Deaton was at the end of his rope. He had a career and a family, but also an overpowering addiction to barbiturates. In light of his increasingly erratic impulses and worried about the destruction his downward spiral could wreak on the ones he loved, Deaton volunteered for the Vietnam War. The war would either cure or kill him, but he was so focused on the end results that he didn’t fully comprehend what was ahead. Deaton’s thoughts and perceptions were scattered by both pills and the action of the world around him, and while the narration supports this feeling, the style can be awkward for readers. Meaning gets muddled in shifts to the present tense and in overly verbose descriptions: “The building itself was smug. It was as smug as a jukebox on a Saturday night, as smug as an organ-grinder with twin monkeys, as smug as the villain in every plot of gothic dimensions.” Once Deaton arrives in Vietnam, the style seems more apt. Quitting his drug habit wasn’t the immediate, cold turkey affair he’d imagined, and his moods and heavy hangovers were just as much a problem as they were at home. He was still constantly tempted, both by substances and the women around him, despite his marriage vows. At the same time, he butted heads with other doctors and soldiers, his authority issues with matters of medical treatment creating conflict with the military rank and file. While many of his early cases make for mundane reading, the realities of war sweep in, threatening Deaton’s life more than once. Danger turns real, interpersonal conflict becomes collegial respect, and his addiction seems certain to be discovered. As patients’ stories fill up the sometimes-gruesome narrative, it’s seldom clear how Deaton’s tour of duty will turn out. Change, like war, was an inevitability.
A complex, potentially alienating writing style clouds this unique war memoir.Pub Date: April 24, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 417
Publisher: Kindle Direct Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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