An eye-opening, deeply felt memoir that brings us behind the cameras in the world’s deadliest hot spots.
Veteran TV war correspondent Fletcher describes several decades of risking life, limb and sanity to chase down stories on the front lines.
Now Tel Aviv bureau chief for NBC News, the author gives a sobering but unforgettable account of a life spent sifting through some of humanity’s worst atrocities. He explains his career choice in part as a way of confronting the loss of much of his extended family in the Holocaust. Spurning a comfortable desk job, he began as a BBC correspondent in the early 1970s and headed out into the field. There he discovered he had a nose for news. More than once, it almost cost him his head, but it also enabled him to submit memorable, prizewinning reports from war zones like Kosovo, Somalia, Cyprus, Rwanda and the Middle East, where the author has lived with his wife and family since the first Gulf War. Although Fletcher provides ample tales of heavy drinking and womanizing with colorful colleagues in his early years, much of his work involved slogging through mud, mountain and jungle in search of grim stories of famine and slaughter. He describes watching colleagues blown to bits by land mines a few feet in front of him, interviewing murderous Somali warlords and witnessing genocide up close in places like Kosovo and Rwanda. Perhaps his most chilling interviews have been clandestine West Bank meetings with Palestinian terrorists dedicated to killing Jews, including the author’s own wife and children. Through it all, Fletcher tries but cannot fully explain his love for a job that has brought him face-to-face with human suffering and mass carnage. But he does candidly acknowledge the emotional toll it has taken, as well as the sheer luck that has kept him alive.
An eye-opening, deeply felt memoir that brings us behind the cameras in the world’s deadliest hot spots.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37118-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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
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
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