An unflinching depiction of the aftermath of war and of the spirit of those who live through it.
Stark, candid memoir by a Time correspondent severely injured while covering the war in Iraq.
A hand grenade tossed into the back of his Humvee turned Weisskopf into a casualty of war. Flinging the explosive out of the vehicle, he lost his right hand and embarked on the odyssey toward his recovery, searingly chronicled in these pages. With high-level help, Weisskopf ended up at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Ward 57 for amputees. There, he found himself uncomfortably trapped between his journalistic detachment and some who wanted to put him on center stage, hailing him for saving others in the attack. He struggled with rehab and with the injury’s impact on his career. This may not be an easy story to read, but it is only one story among many, he reminds us. Describing the backgrounds and experiences of three soldiers also in Ward 57, juxtaposing the similar paths to recovery followed by each man, the author finds other voices and fresh perspectives. Weisskopf was the odd man out in this group: much older, a civilian, a journalist. Haunted by the uncertainty of his actions on that fateful day, he delivers a work of fluctuating tone—sometimes clinical, sometimes cynical, sometimes critical. The real heroes, Weisskopf would have it, are the medical staff, the soldiers convalescing alongside him and the friends and family members who support them all. The journalist has a job to do here, and he does it well. Ward 57 becomes a metaphor for the horrors of war and the triumph of the human will.
An unflinching depiction of the aftermath of war and of the spirit of those who live through it.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-7860-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
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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