An intense memoir that could have been more fully fleshed out.
A young war veteran tells the story of how his tour in Iraq left him unable to cope with day-to-day civilian life.
For Anthony (Mass Casualties: A Young Medic's True Story of Death, Deception, and Dishonor in Iraq, 2009, etc.), life as a soldier in the U.S. Army had its perks. “The rush from constant, near-death experiences was like no other,” he writes. But it also had a pronounced dark side. Days flowed together into a never-ending sameness that made remembering events difficult, and physically overtaxed soldiers, including Anthony, lived on prescribed pain medication. When the author returned to San Diego from his tour, he realized that he was addicted to painkillers and sleeping pills and that “it had been two years since I’d even kissed a woman.” Lonely and miserable, Anthony decided that if his life did not improve in three months, he would kill himself. He began his quest for happiness by signing up for a three-day self-improvement course on how to attract women. Yet all he could manage were brief encounters that did nothing to save him from the emptiness he felt inside. Anthony then moved home to Massachusetts, where he joined a group of men who gathered together to pick up women. There, he met a fellow vet named Gunner, whose rage and addictions mirrored the author’s and who would eventually attempt suicide. Anthony continued to stumble through his days and relationships, desperately searching for relief in alcohol, hypnosis, and PTSD groups for war veterans. He finally decided to kill himself by overdosing on Ambien. Catching sight of a copy of Shakespeare’s Henry V, however, he decided to write his story, an act that saved him from self-destruction and began to bring him back to life. Though the text moves to a conclusion that only outlines the recovery phase of his life, this at-times darkly comic memoir serves as an important reminder of the human cost of America’s involvement in overseas conflicts.
An intense memoir that could have been more fully fleshed out.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-936976-88-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pulp/Zest Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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