A fast-paced account quite likely to engender strong reactions among readers concerned with the U.S. military’s roles in...
A war memoir from a highly decorated Navy SEAL.
The news flash from this book by retired SEAL O’Neill is that he fired the bullets that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. However, the shooting does not occur until more than 300 pages in; the narrative consists of much more than the sensational account of what happened on the top-secret mission to bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Some passages are redacted due to review of the manuscript by U.S. Department of Defense Prepublication and Security Review personnel. In addition, O’Neill disguises the identities of more than a dozen individuals. As a result, judging the accuracy of the sensitive, war-related information presents difficulties, especially in light of previously published information about the bin Laden mission. (The author does not mention the controversial book No Easy Day by fellow SEAL Matt Bissonnette, who wrote using the pen name Mark Owen.) Whatever controversy might ensue, most of the memoir is enlightening about military special forces, especially the SEAL component. Born in 1976 and reared in Butte, Montana, O’Neill enlisted in the Navy in 1995 with the goal of becoming a SEAL. He understood the rigorous training, and he knew the washout rate was high, but he persisted, overcoming months of physical and mental rigor. The author had his first deployment in 1998 and went on to participate in top-secret assignments in Afghanistan and Iraq in addition to battling Somali pirates. Zealously patriotic, O’Neill seems to have never seriously questioned the motivations or consequences of his missions. During his time as a SEAL, O’Neill married and became a father, and he discusses the havoc caused by his military assignments regarding his family life.
A fast-paced account quite likely to engender strong reactions among readers concerned with the U.S. military’s roles in foreign conflicts.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4503-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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
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