Thrilling and sobering, if uneven.
Blow-by-blow tale of a nearly deadly flight into the middle of enemy territory.
Halliday was a novice flyer when he arrived in Thailand to serve with the 606 Special Operations Squadron, the Candlesticks. He begins with his bewildering first days on the base, when he saw fellow pilots entertaining themselves by stretching plastic six-pack rings until they split, or reading the labels on canned goods. He relates the down-the-rabbit-hole feeling of being taken on a training run with a pilot who broke almost every rule Halliday had painstakingly memorized in flight school, and the time that the soldiers watched a movie outdoors in a monsoon (when the wet screen fell to the ground, the men stayed put to watch the image projected onto the solid sheets of rain). All of the background, while interesting, is there to give context to one particular flight that nearly killed the author and his crew. Halliday and company were flying support for a group of sympathetic locals in northern Laos, identified only as “good guys.” When the mission was almost complete, suddenly all hell broke loose, and Halliday ended up taking the plane to an emergency landing strip that should have been impossible to find, and even harder to land on. The fact that it was maintained by a secret force that the president had denied the existence of only complicated matters. Halliday conveys it all in unvarnished and immediate language; the confusion, the determination, the horror and the general unreality of the night are brought to life by the guy who almost didn't make it.
Thrilling and sobering, if uneven.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-7488-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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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