A riveting eyewitness account of the notorious Bataan Death March and of three and a half years in enemy prisoner-of-war camps. Tenney was there on December 8, 1941, when a huge and well- equipped Japanese force invaded the Philippine island of Luzon. After a heroic defense, the American and Filipino soldiers surrendered. In the sadistic march that followed, Japanese soldiers broke all of the rules for humane treatment of prisoners of war. Tenney believes that the Japanese soldiers were seeking revenge for the defenders' stout resistance, the loss of about 20,000 Japanese, and the loss of face of their general. The author notes that the Japanese guards also meant to show their superiority over the Americans before Filipino onlookers by hitting, shoving, and spitting on the starved, sickly prisoners who walked too slowly to the prison camp. In some cases, the Japanese shot, bayoneted, or beheaded Filipino civilians who tried to give food to the Americans. Tenney bitterly remembers the survivors reaching Camp O'Donnell suffering from malaria, dysentery, malnutrition, dehydration, pneumonia, beriberi, or diphtheria. Men were killed in the presence of their comrades in heat of well over 100 degrees. In camp, the author relates, Japanese captors refused medical treatment to American prisoners, who were dying at the rate of 50 or more a day, and to Filipino prisoners, who were dying at the rate of 150 a day. Tenney escaped and joined a guerilla group before being recaptured and returned to Camp O'Donnell, where he was further tortured. Finally sent to Japan, Tenney was set free after the Nagasaki bombing. But he retains a permanent sense of sadness for those who never returned: Of a total of 72,000 who were in the Bataan Death March, only 7,500 survived, and of 12,000 who were Americans, only about 1,500 came home. A grim story of heroic survival.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-881125-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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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