A candid, moving, and entertaining memoir by the US senator from Arizona and potential presidential candidate. Aided by Salter, his legislative assistant since 1989, McCain writes of growing up with his sister and brother as navy “brats,— constantly moving from school to school as their devoted mother filled in the educational cracks at home. The boy was strongly influenced by his father and grandfather, both four-star admirals and war heroes, honest, brave, and loyal men with reassuringly normal human imperfections. An individualist to the core and self-described hell-raiser, McCain chafed under the severe discipline of the US Naval Academy, constantly challenging petty rules he considered unnecessary in the making of an officer. He graduated near the bottom of his class despite being outstanding in history and literature. Flying off the carrier Oriskany in the Vietnam War, he shared the poor regard fellow pilots had for the civilian managers of the war (“complete idiots” in his judgment), who refused to allow airmen to bomb Russian SAM missile sites that were causing heavy US pilot and plane losses. Shot down and captured near Hanoi, McCain suffered more than five years of beatings and torture. Feisty as ever, the POW made it worse for himself by resisting his captors as much as he could, holding onto the steely resolve of his role models, —the faith of his fathers.— He still regrets his single breakdown under severe pain, but McCain has managed to prevent bad memories of war from destroying his present well-being; he feels that Vietnam matured him, strengthened his confidence, and forced him to honestly look at his failures—in youth as well as wartime—while seeing opportunities for redemption. Impressive and inspiring, the story of a man touched and molded by fire who loved and served his country in a time of great trouble, suffering, and challenge. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-50191-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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