An important and eminently readable account from the heart of chaos.
Intense, immediate reporting from the front lines in Afghanistan.
Seized, as soon as the destruction of September 11 became known, with the idea of filing from Afghanistan, New Yorker correspondent Anderson found he needed to bring all of his experience into play just to get into the country. (“One can always find a way to get smuggled in,” he assured his editor, Sharon DeLano, by e-mail on September 12th.) He made it about two weeks later and began sending reports on the lay of the land, the combatants, and the state of affairs among civilians. Here, he presents those pieces, written over the next eight months, in conjunction with his e-mail correspondence with DeLano. The essays (most previously published in the New Yorker) offer snapshots of the war’s progress as Anderson chews over the progression of events with local Northern Alliance leaders, pokes around an abandoned bin Laden compound, interviews the occasional Afghan woman who will risk being seen with him, ferrets out the origin of the rumors of poisoned humanitarian aid rations (some Afghans had eaten the preservative drying agents that keep the food fresh), and casts an eye over Kabul after the fall of the Taliban. His e-mail traces how he got these stories. The result is a sort of war-watcher’s travelogue, letting us in on the vicissitudes that dictate where our man winds up: the difficulties of getting visas, or even moving from one town to another along bandit-controlled byways; the free-wheeling insults traded between reporters and cranky, gun-wielding fighters; the kluges necessitated by meeting deadlines in a pre-industrial landscape; and the love inspired by a fully functional Toughbook computer and Inmarsat satellite phone.
An important and eminently readable account from the heart of chaos.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8021-1723-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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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