An unsettling and riveting book filled with the mysteries of human nature.
Afghanistan war veteran Farwell and Newsweek and Harper’s contributor Ames combine to investigate the high-profile military crimes of Bowe Bergdahl.
Born to a loving rural Idaho family in 1986, Bergdahl, from a young age, demonstrated a puzzling, sometimes-clashing mixture of character attributes: useful personal skills vs. restlessness; kindness to others vs. self-centeredness; a desire to be accepted vs. hermitlike tendencies. As a teenager, he left Idaho to join the Coast Guard but could not cope psychologically and left in less than a month. Two years later, the Army, desperate for soldiers to staff invasions of nations harboring alleged terrorists, accepted Bergdahl as a combat trainee despite knowledge of his Coast Guard discharge. Dispatched to a lethal Afghan war zone in May 2009, Bergdahl quickly questioned the purpose of U.S. military involvement, found many of his commanding officers to be insufferable, and sought to use whatever moments he could carve out to show civilians the human side of American soldiers. The authors show unequivocally that Bergdahl planned to walk away from his remote military post into forbidden, life-threatening territory. After his capture by Islamic terrorists, during five years of imprisonment at undisclosed locations across the border of Pakistan, every moment in Bergdahl’s existence became fodder for controversy at an international level. The authors present compelling, convincing evidence that addresses each specific controversial element: Was Bergdahl planning to become an enemy combatant? Was he actually tortured? Why did the U.S. military and government lie to the public about some of the details surrounding his capture? Did the U.S. government properly handle the negotiations for his release? Did he deserve a court-martial that would have landed him in prison until death? Throughout this twisting saga, readers will also receive detailed portraits of Bergdahl’s parents, rural Idaho, pointless foreign incursions by the American government, and much more.
An unsettling and riveting book filled with the mysteries of human nature.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2104-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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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