The result is on a par with Michael Herr’s Dispatches as literature—but, unlike Herr’s book, scrupulously true, making it a...
An extraordinary grunt’s-eye view of the Vietnam War, by a former CBS News correspondent.
Line troops and combat reporters, writes Laurence, are a superstitious lot. As an “edge against the fear,” he himself wore the same set of threadbare fatigues each time out, didn’t polish his boots, and carried “coins, charms, four-leaf clovers, religious medals and all kinds of talismans”—everything, in short, but a weapon, the lack of which, he hoped, would keep him from being killed. He may have been on to something, for, while covering the 1968 siege of Hue (where he encountered the shell-shocked kitten, the cat of the title, that figures in so much of the narrative), Laurence wandered into the sights of a North Vietnamese army soldier who could easily have shot him dead but, inexplicably, did not. He had many other brushes with death covering military operations up and down Vietnam from 1965 to 1970, but he’s careful to keep his focus on the soldiers, civilians, and other participants less willing than he to be caught up in the fire. That focus is close, and it yields affecting views; of a group of young field marines, for instance, he writes, “War seemed to make them more humane, more gentle, at least with each other, as if everybody involved in this violent undertaking was trying to behave his best, not knowing what might be coming next.” Among the many high points here is a long section describing the author’s time with a star-crossed infantry unit during the invasion of Cambodia, a tour that yielded the documentary The World of Charlie Company. Though many of its threads eventually come together, Laurence’s narrative reads less as a coherent story than as a loose, slightly hallucinatory string of anecdotes, which, considering the circumstances, seems altogether appropriate.
The result is on a par with Michael Herr’s Dispatches as literature—but, unlike Herr’s book, scrupulously true, making it a standout in a crowded field.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-891620-31-2
Page Count: 864
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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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