A deeply personal, at times moving story of one man’s American experience.
A husband, soldier, and public servant tells his own story.
Belied by its somewhat self-aggrandizing title, Vernon’s debut nonfiction is actually an unassuming, heartfelt memoir concentrating on his difficult and abuse-ridden formative years, his experiences in the Army, rising to the rank of colonel before his retirement, and his 2011 bid for the U.S. Senate. His account opens with his hardscrabble childhood years and gains momentum as he enlists in the Army in 1977. His military career had quite a few dramatic highlights, including service in Bosnia guarding the War Crimes Tribunal and a stint in Saudi Arabia, where he served in close proximity to his wife, who worked in the nearby diplomatic compound. In Saudi Arabia, he had a close call, narrowly avoiding death or injury during a bombing of Army headquarters in Riyadh in November 1995. “Sunlight completely illuminated the cafeteria, where only minutes earlier, both my wife and I would have been eating our lunch,” he writes. “The entire east wall had been blown out.” With appealing humility, the climactic chapters detail his run for the U.S. Senate: “the road to politics is akin to the road to a music career,” he says. “The problem with what I’ve just said is that I can’t sing a lick, so politics seems much more do-able!” He faced growing disillusionment with his fellow Republicans, many of whom struck him as shallow and greedy (although he was impressed by GOP candidate Mitt Romney). All these stories are illuminated by Vernon’s love for his wife and family. More controversial to some readers will be the short essays collected at the back of the book on subjects like Planned Parenthood—“its true mission is to generate big bucks”—gun control, the many failings of “progressives” like President Barack Obama, and the “reckless and tyrannical style of government” into which the country has fallen. These essays risk turning off readers won over by the likable narrator in the book’s earlier sections.
A deeply personal, at times moving story of one man’s American experience.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1502895189
Page Count: 228
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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