Novelist Kotlowitz acts as his fallen buddies' unofficial company historian of their combat duty in WW II, from army basic training to a precipitous, disastrous encounter with the enemy. More than 50 years after WW II, with over half its veterans now dead, Kotlowitz (His Master's Voice, 1992, etc.) recounts his own experiences, in part to find ``a definitive end to the accumulated weight of sadness and nostalgia.'' With this simple goal, his straightforward prose captures both the mundane and the horrific features of a soldier's life, as well as his own teenager's naãvetÇ. After getting bucked out of a training program in order to supply his division with live bodies after D-day, Kotlowitz is thrown into an eclectic mix of soldiers in the so-called ``Yankee Division.'' His commanding officer is a textbook-trained OCS graduate and former university football tackle from Ohio, his squad leader a generally reliable soldier with a tendency to go AWOL under pressure, and his buddies a melting-pot mix of draftees. Infantry life quickly sorts them into a soldiers' hierarchy, right down to the squad's sad sack, but Kotlowitz gives each man his balanced due. After an uneventful delay awaiting deployment orders in France, he and his buddies find themselves on the front, dug in a few hundred yards from the well-prepared Germans, in the fall of 1944. When they are finally sent forward, the assault is so disastrous that he survives only by ``playing the living corpse'' among his platoon, one of just three survivors. After subjecting him to grilling by the division's historian and its psychiatrist, the army, ironically, sends him behind lines to recuperate by guarding a warehouse of duffel bags, some of which belonged to his fallen buddies. An unsentimental, honest testament to the individual experience of war—the kind that history overlooks.
Pub Date: Feb. 3, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-44789-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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