Joseph Heller would have felt right at home in this absurd and murderous milieu. (b&w photos)
A rambling memoir of the doomed effort to bring peace to Bosnia, from a British officer in the United Nations force.
The UN was wary when Britain proposed career military man Stankovic for assignment to Bosnia in 1992, fearing he might bring along an agenda inherited from his parents, Yugoslavian immigrants of Serbian ancestry. (His mother and father weren't too keen about the assignment either.) But he was one of only three Britons proposed who could speak the language, and the UN desperately needed translators. Stankovic became much more than that: demonstrating an ability to climb right into the Serbian leaders' heads, he ended up as a fixer entrusted to make deals. His book immerses readers in a mad world whose feuds are traced back with obscene pride to the battle of Kosovo in 1389. In this society of 700-year-old grudges, where neither trust nor the notion of tolerance exists, the UN never has a chance. Stankovic traces his time in Bosnia through contemporary diary-like entries and later “sessions” with a psychiatrist after his arrest under Britain’s draconian Official Secrets Act. (The charges of spying for the Serbians certainly sound ludicrous, even taking into account the fact that Stankovic is doing the telling; the fact that he was eventually released suggests they were baseless.) Though the bluster can get thick—“red hot steel fragments slicing through aluminum, piercing the fuel tank, which we were sitting on, and wooooossssh . . . frying tonight! Fuck this!”—Stankovic does a terrific job of clarifying the testosterone-driven conflict between the NATO and UN forces, the former a fighting machine, the latter a vehicle for peace, but both happy to turn Bosnia into “a mad professor’s laboratory in which a very unpleasant war was used as a proving ground to define the set of the New World Disorder.”
Joseph Heller would have felt right at home in this absurd and murderous milieu. (b&w photos)Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-00-257024-6
Page Count: 476
Publisher: HarperCollins UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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