The snapshot format necessarily risks superficiality, but these images and dispatches from the numberless rooms of hell have...
An online reporter visits some of the world’s nastiest places, where wars rage and ordinary people with extraordinary courage suffer unspeakable pain and loss.
Freelancing for NBC News in 2004, Sites shot the controversial footage seen around the world of a Marine murdering a helpless wounded Iraqi in a mosque. That episode and its aftermath, followed by his coverage of the 2004 tsunami (he happened to be scuba diving in the most affected region), form a prologue to the main story. When NBC offered him a staff job on the condition that he get a haircut, shave his goatee and go to “correspondent ‘boot camp,’ ” Sites turned instead to Yahoo! News to develop his “Hot Zone” project: a website featuring footage, text and slide shows from the world’s most searing spots. From September 2005 to August 2006, he skimmed the globe, stopping for brief periods to interview locals; observe battles; visit hospitals, morgues and ruined neighborhoods; and, when madness threatened, to surf or kick around a soccer ball with some teenagers. On his itinerary: Mogadishu, the Congo, Uganda, Sudan, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Israel and just about every other place where people were killing one another for reasons ranging from religious differences to territorial disputes. Sites believes that a single individual’s story can often be the best way to make us see vast landscapes of brutality and suffering, and so he tells us about people who’ve lost limbs to land mines, entire families to a tsunami, a husband to errant shrapnel, a future to the insidious workings of Agent Orange. “War poses as combat, but is really collateral damage,” he writes. “The actual fighting between armed groups is a small and infrequent element, while the violence they radiate on civil society and themselves will last for generations.”
The snapshot format necessarily risks superficiality, but these images and dispatches from the numberless rooms of hell have an undeniable cumulative power.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-122875-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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