An uplifting account of genuine heroics in the latest American military debacle.
A suspenseful chronicle of a dramatic rescue at the end of America’s evacuation of Afghanistan in 2021.
In his latest, Zuckoff, the bestselling author of 13 Hours and Fall and Rise, finds his hero in Sam Aronson, who gave up his job as a bodyguard for the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service to become a Foreign Service officer; his first post was in Nigeria. Later, while volunteering to help in Afghanistan, he found himself at Kabul International Airport with only a few weeks before its scheduled shutdown. The author delivers a vivid description of the enormous crowds besieging its fortified gates in blazing heat with no food, water, or toilets. Fewer than 40 officials, Aronson included, screened potential evacuees to ensure that their papers were in order or that they were in obvious danger and needed to get out. Screeners were overwhelmed, and as the deadline approached, superiors increasingly restricted those eligible to evacuate. “Family separations again proved the most wrenching part of the work,” writes Zuckoff. “Weeping women clung to Sam. Men cried in his arms. Sam had to pry some away, into the custody of Marines.” The book’s other major figure is Homeira Qaderi, a 38-year-old Afghan activist, author, and TV commentator, whose memoir, Dancing in the Mosque (2020) was a bestseller. At the time, no one doubted that the victorious Taliban would kill her, but for reasons that remain unclear, she refused pleas to flee until the last day. Aronson and Qaderi do not meet until near the end of the book. Mostly, Zuckoff delivers a gripping account of Aronson’s routine during those final days. Increasingly distressed at the tragedies he witnessed, he began to flout screening guidelines, a process that could have derailed his career but apparently hasn’t. Only hours before the shutdown, he received frantic pleas from Qaderi’s American agent. A last-minute rescue seemed impossible, but he made it happen.
An uplifting account of genuine heroics in the latest American military debacle.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780593594841
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
For fans only.
The hoodie-and-shorts-clad Pennsylvania senator blends the political and personal, and often not nicely.
Fetterman’s memoir addresses three major themes. The first—and the one he leads with—is depression and mental illness, which, combined with a stroke and heart trouble, brought him to a standstill and led him to contemplate suicide. The second is his rise to national-level politics from a Rust Belt town; as he writes, he’s carved a path as a contentious player with a populist streak and a dislike for elites. There are affecting moments in his personal reminiscences, especially when he writes of the lives of his working-class neighbors in impoverished southwestern Pennsylvania, its once-prosperous Monongahela River Valley “the most heartbreaking drive in the United States.” It’s the third element that’s problematic, and that’s his in-the-trenches account of daily politics. One frequent complaint is the media, as when he writes of one incident, “I am not the first public figure to get fucked by a reporter, and I won’t be the last. What was eye-opening was the window it gave into how people with disabilities navigate a world that doesn’t give a shit.” He reserves special disdain for his Senate race opponent Mehmet Oz, about whom he wonders, “If I had run against any other candidate…would I have lost? He got beaten by a guy recovering from a stroke.” Perhaps so, and Democratic stalwarts will likely be dismayed at his apparent warmish feelings for Donald Trump and dislike of his own party’s “performative protests.” If Fetterman’s book convinces a troubled soul to seek help, it will have done some good, but it’s hard to imagine that it will make much of an impression in the self-help literature. One wonders, meanwhile, at sentiments such as this: “If men are forced to choose between picking their party or keeping their balls, most men are going to choose their balls.”
For fans only.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593799826
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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