An honest, graphic portrait of young men on the modern battlefield.
A young Oxford graduate’s tale of heat, boredom and adrenaline-rush warfare in Afghanistan.
Now in his late 20s, Hennessey became a captain in the Grenadier Guards at age 22 and soon learned to love combat and its “danger and…startling unpredictability.” His irreverent, nonstop narrative offers a revealing view of young British soldiers, many university-educated, all armed with iPods and video games, as they seek wartime glory and action. Telling girlfriends they’re off to hunt Osama bin Laden, they initially found themselves keeping tourists happy in London, maintaining the peace in the Balkans and fighting the desert heat in Iraq, where the author and his military-academy buddies launched their eponymous reading club. While sitting around in boxer shorts between shifts, they read fraying paperback editions of Catch-22, Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy and other novels whose surreal aspects had striking immediacy in the strange otherness of war. Their reading—along with video games, the music of Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley and much-needed Facebook fixes—provided a respite between patrols and eventual firefights with “Terry,” the enemy, first in Baghdad and then, in 2007, amid sandstorms and head-high poppies in Afghanistan. Relating much of his story in e-mails, Hennessey captures the fear and excitement of combat, celebrating “just how easy it all was, how natural it all felt and how much fun,” even as he grieved over the deaths of comrades. Though the frequent use of acronyms and British slang may put off some American readers, the author offers numerous vivid snapshots of his experiences—watching Band of Brothers and Gladiator to learn combat techniques; giant platoon snowball fights in Bosnia; a debate on the best iPod music for their first mission (they select Metallica); futile attempts to train undisciplined troops of the Afghan National Army who couldn’t shape their berets, couldn’t hit targets with their rusted or broken AK-47s and wore whatever they wanted; and the Bangladeshi Pizza Hut workers’ continuing delivery of pies during mortar attacks on a logistics base in Iraq.
An honest, graphic portrait of young men on the modern battlefield.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59448-479-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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