Of some interest, surely, to those who served with Shachnow, but too limited to add to our understanding of the events he...
Marginally useful memoir by a Holocaust survivor and American general.
Now retired from military service, debut author Shachnow was ten years old when he and his family were interned in a concentration camp along with other Lithuanian Jews. “I developed an instinct for survival,” he recalls. “If I saw any kind of trouble, I hid. I learned to disappear into an alley, a doorway, or behind a shrub.” After three years of captivity, he escaped, hidden by a Catholic family until the Red Army arrived. Astonishingly, his mother, father, and brother had also survived. Convinced by an uncle to flee before the borders were sealed, the family moved westward toward the American zone, arriving in Germany in the fall of 1945. It took four years for them to secure permission to emigrate to America, where young Sid found work pumping gas and delivering groceries until joining the army in 1955. In the military, he writes, he blossomed, graduating at the top of his class from officer candidates school; apparently moved as much by the needs of his growing family (“hostile fire pay was $55 per month extra”) as by career ambitions, he then volunteered for training in the Special Forces and assignment to Vietnam, where he distinguished himself in combat. After the war, he rose through the officer grades until attaining the rank of major general and commanding the Special Forces. None of these are ordinary events or attainments, but Shachnow writes with little sense of drama or self-reflection. Instead, in good military fashion, he too often reverts to pat phrases: he offers that his experience in the camps instilled a desire to “make sure no threat to freedom would go unchallenged again,” adding, “Communism was a real threat and it had to be stopped” and repeating the tired assertion that politicians, not soldiers, lost the war in Vietnam.
Of some interest, surely, to those who served with Shachnow, but too limited to add to our understanding of the events he describes.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-765-30792-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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