As Kirkus said 47 years ago: “For that Reader’s Digest reader who finds this type of personal examination and regeneration...
A 1936 Olympic runner and WWII bombardier recalls his troubled youth, his horrifying wartime experiences, his postwar decline, and his conversion to Christianity at a 1949 Billy Graham crusade.
Zamperini was a skinny, gawky kid who suffered the derision of his classmates and compensated by fighting, stealing, hopping trains, and flouting authorities. But his older brother, a talented long-distance runner, coaxed Bill into trying track. He did so, and found his gift. Practicing relentlessly, he became a great long-distance runner in high school and college (USC), then one day found himself performing with Jesse Owens on the Olympic track in Berlin—and exchanging a few words with the Führer himself. (No medals, though.) He was among a handful of runners approaching the four-minute mile, but nothing came easily. When war broke out, Zamperini trained as a bombardier and flew a few dangerous missions in the South Pacific. During an attempt to rescue some other downed fliers, his plane was shot down; he and fellow crewmembers survived for 47 days in an open rubber raft by catching rainwater and fish. (They also survived an attack by a great white shark.) The Japanese eventually picked them up, and Zamperini moved from one unsavory site to another, enduring two years of poor diet and physical and psychological abuse. His family back in America presumed he was dead. When the war ended, he became a temporary celebrity, then slipped into a slough of alcoholic despond from which he did not emerge until his wife convinced him to go hear Billy Graham. A conversion to Christianity ensued, and Zamperini thereafter lived an exemplary life, delivering countless testimonies at gatherings of the faithful. He has published his story once before in 1955 (same title, different ghost writer, foreword by Graham) and here deviates little from the I-was-a-no-good-backsliding-slob-until-I-found-Jesus tale so common in the Christian conversion genre.
As Kirkus said 47 years ago: “For that Reader’s Digest reader who finds this type of personal examination and regeneration rewarding.” (1 map, b&w photos)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-018860-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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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