One can hardly imagine a finer boots-on-the-ground chronicle of this open-ended conflict, no matter how long it may last.
From the front lines in the war on terror, a former Marine captain’s lucid account of his transformation from privileged college student to fighter in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Fick, now a student at Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government, intended to go to med school until flunking a chemistry class at Dartmouth persuaded him to major in classics. Feeling insufficiently challenged by both academics and athletics, he gravitated toward Officer Candidate School for an experience he hoped would be “more transformative. Something that might kill me—or leave me better, stronger, and more capable.” He gets it. A grueling summer of training is a mere prelude to more elite challenges, where Fick’s teachers push him past the point of consciousness, instruct him on how to suppress panic, avoid capture and resist torture. Eventually, he makes it to Recon, the Marines’ special operations force. To Fick’s credit, these sections are every bit as compelling as his recollections of putting his training into practice, whether in Afghanistan just weeks after 9/11, where he helped recover a downed Black Hawk helicopter, or Iraq, where on his order—“Light him up!”—his platoon fired on vehicles speeding toward them. Quoting Plutarch and Thucydides, Fick’s memoir is steeped in duty, honor and tradition. Moreover, his commitment to the soldiers in his charge is unwavering: He took 65 men to war and brought them all back. Sure to be compared to Anthony Swofford’s profane, self-loathing Jarhead, Fick’s account puts the Marines in a vastly more flattering light. Far more than a glory-soaked collection of war stories, this memoir proves the ideal of the scholar-soldier as alive and well.
One can hardly imagine a finer boots-on-the-ground chronicle of this open-ended conflict, no matter how long it may last.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-55613-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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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