A stirring but fair account of courage in the face of infamous behavior.
A searing chronicle of the indomitable courage of an American POW as he struggles to survive the cruel, inhumane, and often sadistic treatment meted out by his Japanese captors.
Poet/songwriter Pearson’s inspiring account is also a timely reminder that the American experience in the Far East in WWII is not particularly well known. Relying on newspaper clippings about Navy corpsman Estel Myers, as well interviews with his family and veterans who served in the Pacific, Pearson makes Myers’s story the centerpiece of what is as much a biographical narrative as a mini-history of the war. In 1938, young Estel Myers, the eldest of a sharecropping family, left their failing farm in Kentucky, enlisted in the navy, and trained as a hospital corpsman. In 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he was stationed in the Philippines. When the Japanese captured Manila, where he was working in a military hospital, he became, together with thousands of other Americans left behind by the retreating US army, a POW. The Japanese, who had not signed the Geneva Convention, tortured and starved prisoners—food was often a thin soup and a few grains rice—provided scanty medical supplies so that surgery on the wounded was frequently performed without anesthesia, and forced the relatively healthy to work punishing hours as slave laborers. Myers cheerfully took care of the sick and wounded as best he could, but in 1944, his optimism was tested when, along with 1,600 other prisoners, he was marched through Manila and into the hold of a freighter, where there was only standing room. Pearson graphically relates how the ship came under American fire near the Bataan coast, and Myers and the other surviving prisoners had to swim ashore. Myers, emaciated and malnourished, next endured an equally hellish voyage to Japan, where he cared for the sick under impossible conditions. Released after the Japanese surrender, Myers weighed 60 pounds, his health permanently ruined.
A stirring but fair account of courage in the face of infamous behavior.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-451-20444-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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
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