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
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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