An absorbing firsthand saga of war's invisible casualties.
A Vietnam vet's wife fights a long battle with her husband's post-traumatic stress disorder in this poignant memoir.
When her husband Jim, a 27-year-old Marine, returned intact from Vietnam in 1969, the author hoped that the couple could resume their lives as before. But although Jim bore no physical scars from his year in combat, his psychic wounds ran deep. Indeed, he hardly seemed to have left the war. He was plagued by nightmares and flashbacks in which he would call for medevac choppers or imagine himself surrounded by enemies. He veered between hypervigilance and catatonic staring, insisted on sitting with his back to a wall so he could survey his perimeter, and was spooked by both loud noises and silence; only the soothing sound of crickets could convince him there was nothing lying in wait. Over the decades, Jim's illness took a heavy toll; he lost jobs and eventually became unemployable, withdrew emotionally from his wife and sons and endured periodic hospitalizations. (In the author's telling, the Veterans Administration long ignored the Vietnam-era PTSD epidemic and was more a hindrance than a help in coping with Jim's problems.) In her clear-eyed memoir, King draws a subtle, layered portrait of her lost soul of a husband. Sometimes he seems unreachable, sunk in memories of Vietnam and of his buddies who didn't make it back (or in guilt over his own survival) and unable to carry out the simplest project; but he also devotedly serves as a volunteer fireman and pulls himself together to help his wife through crises and grief. It is as much the author's story as Jim's, as she struggles to hold the family together and fathom the stranger her husband has become, and to reclaim her own personality from the ravages of "secondary" PTSD. With America's latest conflicts still generating victims, this is a very timely book: an anguished, unsparing, but ultimately hopeful view of the heartbreak of PTSD.
An absorbing firsthand saga of war's invisible casualties.Pub Date: March 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4415-7354-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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