Son of Gen. Lewis ``Chesty'' Puller, the most decorated Marine ever, the author is a Vietnam vet who lost both legs and parts of both hands in the war. Here is his story, which seems to have as much to say about alcoholism as it does about the plight of the veteran. Puller does not acknowledge that he was an alcoholic prior to the war but, through the events he describes, the reader becomes aware of possible early-stage alcoholism. During the weeks prior to his departure for Officer Candidate School, for example, he embarked on a crash course of physical conditioning because of his ``four years of abuse'' to his body; on the day he graduated from OCS, he made sure that he ``had time to sign in...and still pick up a bottle...before the package store closed.'' And Puller recounts his drinking on his belated honeymoon and on the plane to Vietnam as a matter of course. His relationship with his father was one of admiration, he reports, though his early experience as a platoon leader convinced him that a military career was not for him. This and other steps in self-knowledge, however, appear to have been interrupted by his severe wounding. His description of his recovery is painful, heroic—and always clouded by alcohol. Even his sexual reunion in the hospital with his wife is accompanied by ``early afternoon tippling.'' In August 1969, as he began to ``look more closely at the Vietnam War and the leadership in Washington,'' he was angered by a mild statement made by another veteran in defense of protesters' right to free speech: in response, he ``[drank] too much that evening.'' Through long self-struggle, however, Puller has licked booze and now works as an attorney. Puller writes well; his story will appeal to veterans and their families, as well as those interested in the relationship between substance abuse and self-fulfillment.
Pub Date: June 17, 1991
ISBN: 0-8021-1218-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
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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