An empathetic and extremely candid memoir from a man who decided “to remember how I decided not to die…not let my future...
A distinguished journalist and former Marine’s account of returning home from Vietnam and finding personal and professional success despite life-altering disfigurement.
In January 1967, Timberg (State of Grace: A Memoir of Twilight Time, 2004, etc.) was days away from the end of his tour in Vietnam when his combat vehicle struck a land mine. He survived, but flames scorched his face and arms, leaving him with third-degree burns. In less than two years, Timberg underwent 25 of the 35 reconstructive surgeries he would need to regain his health. Yet by the end, he still looked “like a monster.” Uncertain of his future and in need of a career to support his growing family, Timberg studied journalism at Stanford, where he realized that although writing was a solitary profession, he would still have to interact with others as a reporter and show the face that marked him as a participant in an unpopular war. It was only after he landed his first job as a reporter for the Evening Capital in Annapolis and began engaging with his work that he began his “transition from victim” to committed journalist. Timberg quickly moved from covering local news to reporting on the Naval Academy. Ambitious and yearning for greater challenges, the author transferred to the Baltimore Sun, where he covered local politics and, eventually, the White House. But increasing success came at a price, including the end of his first marriage. Timberg also found that he could not leave his military past behind. In 1986, the Sun tapped him to cover the Iran-Contra scandal, which involved three Naval Academy graduates: Oliver North, Robert McFarlane and John Poindexter. The scandal, and the book that later emerged from it, became a kind of extended catharsis for Timberg. Both forced him to revisit his own brutal experiences and, in so doing, help a nation still tormented by Vietnam find the beginnings of its own peace.
An empathetic and extremely candid memoir from a man who decided “to remember how I decided not to die…not let my future die.”Pub Date: July 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59420-566-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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