A highly amped, ————- book that ———- readers will find...
A heavily redacted tale of how recruiting sources within the Taliban from top-secret CIA encampments in Afghanistan is exhilarating but not conducive to maintaining healthy relationships back home.
Smith, a pseudonym, spent several years on the ground in remote areas of Afghanistan, clashing with agency bureaucracy, growing a large beard, achieving fluency in several dialects of the local language, and occasionally being mistaken for a local. With the aid of Pezzullo, a prolific collaborator on the memoirs of those in Special Forces and the intelligence community (Zero Footprint, 2016, etc.), Smith recounts his swashbuckling exploits in inelegant prose, distinguished chiefly by the conceit that huge amounts of it—lone words, whole paragraphs, occasionally the majority of a page—are visibly redacted. An example: “After a month of playing cowboy, I returned to the daily grind of Langley and started dating a sweet brunette named Hannah, ——— ——————————————— ———————————- ——————— —- ———-. Determined to maintain my cover, I told her, Austin, and my other friends that I worked for a —————— (private company).” Once the author moves from headquarters to the redacted but easily identifiable province in Afghanistan where he was first stationed, the redactions become ever longer and more frequent, leaving major questions for readers. One fully redacted paragraph even has a footnote sourcing the unshown information to a Wikipedia article. While Smith (purportedly) had little difficulty mastering the language and cultivating sources in hostile territory, maintaining his cover for his girlfriends was another matter, and his work led to the demise of multiple romances. Many friends, he learned, “thought I was deliberately being mysterious to make it appear that my life was more interesting than it was. Ironically, some of them thought that I wanted them to think that I was a spy.”
A highly amped, ————- book that ———- readers will find ————.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08136-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
