A detailed, almost passionless narrative of the author’s combat-heavy tour of duty in the Vietnam War. TeCube spent the 12 months beginning in January 1968 as an infantryman with the US Army’s American Division in Vietnam. His year in the war zone consisted of a steady, dangerous diet of combat assaults, search and destroy missions, night ambushes, reconnaissance patrols, helicopter landings in enemy territory, and countless mortar, sniper, and satchel charge attacks on his base camps. TeCube, a Jicarilla Apache from New Mexico, tells his Vietnam War story chronologically in a dry narrative style that is long on detail and short on reflection. TeCube seemingly leaves nothing out, offering at times almost minute-by-minute details on his war experiences, from the mundane to the adrenaline-charged. Even when he writes about the worst that war has to offer, TeCube rarely does little more than describe, almost dispassionately, what took place. Only occasionally does the author reflect on his upbringing on the reservation in New Mexico and on the Indian religious teachings that helped him through his year in combat. The one section in which TeCube gives more than a hint of analysis is when he describes his tangential involvement in the My Lai massacre. TeCube’s company acted as a blocking force at My Lai. He was not present at the killing and didn’t learn of the massacre until 16 months later. His company, though, was thoroughly familiar with the very dangerous area around My Lai. “I do not condone the killings. However,” he says, “I can understand why it happened.” After American forces’ suffering many killed and wounded in the area, the “situation was ripe for the animal to emerge. Unfortunately, at My Lai it appears that the animal completely took over not just one individual, but a whole unit.” A solid if largely unenlightening Vietnam War memoir.
Pub Date: April 30, 1999
ISBN: 0-8032-4434-7
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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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