by Jon Kerstetter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 2017
An inspiring memoir that will be highly useful to readers struggling with PTSD and other wartime injuries.
A soldier and physician writes of overcoming wounds visible and invisible upon returning from battle.
“Use your Army skills….View the change as any change in the battlefield.” It’s perhaps not the advice most stroke victims might expect to receive, but it’s military issue, and it did the job. As Kerstetter writes, he came into the military late, joining the Iowa National Guard as a doctor during Desert Storm at the significantly advanced age of 42. That was a subject of much worry to his wife, he writes, since he would “always be answering to officers ten to fifteen years younger.” His reply: “Most of the officers in our class were young, brash and full of vigor. I was older but still full of vigor.” As a flight surgeon during the subsequent Iraq War, he saw the horrors of war up close; in one of the most gruesome episodes, he was called on to fit exploded body parts together for identification and was “overtaken by a certain dread and hopelessness that all of human life was reduced to the emptiness of gritty sounds and the mechanical vibrations of a body bag zipper.” The author’s emergence as a military doctor makes for interesting reading, as he traveled from poverty on an Oneida reservation in Wisconsin to a critically important role in frontline lifesaving. But what is of greatest value in this narrative is Kerstetter’s ongoing, twofold recovery from a stroke on one hand and PTSD on the other. In the latter instance, as he writes, he was not especially helped because, convinced as so many soldiers are that emotional stress is a weakness, he ran up against a doctor who ran things by clipboard: “when she spoke about war and trauma, it seemed to me she did so from the vantage point of a textbook or VA seminar on treating soldiers.” The author’s medical perspective on his own condition and critical therapeutic moments adds depth to an already solid story.
An inspiring memoir that will be highly useful to readers struggling with PTSD and other wartime injuries.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-90437-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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