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
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
