A visceral reminder of war’s intimate slaughter.
Anguished eyewitness account of the devastation visited upon the civilian Vietnamese population just a month before the massacre of My Lai.
The author was a well-known South Vietnamese poet and novelist then living with her husband and children in Saigon. She was caught in the middle of the Vietcong’s Tet Offensive in early 1968 when she received news that her father had just died and promptly traveled to her native town of Hue, in central Vietnam, for the burial service. The next day, the Communists shelled the Buddhist town, terrorizing the population and waging horrific battles with the combined South Vietnamese Nationalist and American forces over many weeks. The author’s narrative burns with firsthand accounts, her own and those of others who shared their stories, as they all were trapped in blasted houses, churches and makeshift shelters, wounded, starving, sick and overrun by the Communists and their squads of vengeful executioners. In an extensive introduction, the translator of this important work, first published in 1969, just over a year after the horrific events it chronicles, sets up the significance of the large-scale Tet Offensive for the Vietcong, who hoped the South Vietnamese would rise up and support them; the Communists were eventually driven back by the Nationalists and the Americans, leaving thousands dead and unaccounted for. Yet the author’s work speaks for itself; it’s a searing first-person account of the misery of war visited upon her family, neighbors and countrymen, caught in senseless, chaotic horror. The author does not portray the Americans as saviors; rather, in her narrative, they are young, clueless and, in many instances, scornful of this “small yellow-skinned nation” they know little about and so calloused to the sanctity of life that they amuse themselves by shooting at dogs.
A visceral reminder of war’s intimate slaughter.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-253-01417-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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