A well-written account of one man’s righteous quest to overcome government bureaucracy.
A highly readable memoir from a former USAID worker who battled PTSD and bureaucratic red tape to help Iraqi refugees find asylum in the United States.
As a consequence of a childhood trip to Egypt, Johnson took an interest in Middle Eastern civilization and became fluent in Arabic. After the American invasion of Iraq, the author intended to use his Arabic skills as a tool for rebuilding the war-torn country. He arrived in Iraq in early 2005 to find life inside the Green Zone too confining, so he shifted into the role of USAID reconstruction coordinator in Fallujah, where the exposure to the tensions of a war zone proved to be a tremendous emotional strain. While on Christmas vacation with his family in the Dominican Republic, a dissociative fugue state caused Johnson to leap from a building and narrowly escape death. Instead of returning to his work in Iraq, Johnson moved into his parents’ suburban home for a period of prolonged rehabilitation. His injuries drew him into a dark depression and increasing paranoia, until correspondence with former Iraqi co-workers provided a route away from his personal demons. Through emails, Johnson heard stories and saw videos detailing the threats, physical abuse and assassinations waiting for the former Iraqi employees of the American military and government. Using American diplomatic actions in Vietnam as a legal precedent, Johnson constructed an ever-growing list of Iraqis needing rescue and, eventually, a nonprofit organization (“The List Project”) to bring Iraqis to safety in the United States. Johnson makes sharp criticisms of the maddening government administrations that continue to block the implementation of this project.
A well-written account of one man’s righteous quest to overcome government bureaucracy.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1048-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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
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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