Speaking to both animal welfare and the well-being of wounded warriors, Montalván’s memoir is a testimonial to the “quest...
Affecting memoir by wounded veteran and PTSD–treatment advocate Montalván (Until Tuesday: A Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him, 2011), well known for his public appearances with his service dog, Tuesday.
“I’ve never sat down and calculated the thousands and thousands of miles we’ve traveled together, but I do know this much: The longest journey of all was the one inside my head.” So writes Purple Heart recipient Montalván, whose body was shattered in combat in Iraq and who suffered the well-documented travails of stress upon his return. In the company of Tuesday, an affable golden retriever with dancing eyebrows, the author worked his way out of the solitude of an apartment and began to advocate for veterans’ rights across the country. Montalván’s tone ranges from the affectionate to the aggrieved, just as his narrative ranges from an inspirational encounter with a withdrawn Tuskegee Airman to some difficult passages describing what it feels like to be blown up, to lose a limb—and, moreover, to be sculpted surgically to accommodate a prosthetic leg: “My leg—or where my leg had been that morning—felt weird and slightly indescribable. But it didn’t hurt anymore, and I can’t tell you what a relief that absence of pain felt like to me.” It makes a sad denouement to know that the author, who writes hopefully of a continued life of advocacy and travel with Tuesday, committed suicide after finishing the book. His co-author offers the similarly hopeful thought that “Luis is waiting in a meadow somewhere for his beloved Tuesday,” but the event should reinforce Montalván’s insistence that American combat veterans need more and better support from the government that sent them in harm’s way.
Speaking to both animal welfare and the well-being of wounded warriors, Montalván’s memoir is a testimonial to the “quest for wholeness” and the healing power of companionship.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-31441-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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