An engaging journalistic account of American military and civilian service during wartime.
A journalist’s anthology of interviews with soldiers from several American wars as well as other patriots.
In his latest book, Wheatley (The Trial of Phillis Wheatley, 2014, etc.) offers a collection of wartime remembrances, mostly told by American veterans. The author largely finds these soldiers close to his home in Scituate, Massachusetts, as many of them were respondents to an advertisement he’s run for years in local newspapers. In one instance, he spotted a sign in front of a house that read “Our Soldier is Home” and returned later to chat with Daniel Hanafin, a U.S. Marine who served in Iraq during the first Gulf War. Although Wheatley personally interviewed most of the soldiers here, he relies on historical records in circumstances in which it simply wasn’t possible; for example, in one welcome expression of historical breadth, he discusses both the American Revolutionary War and the Civil War. The range of Wheatley’s interview subjects is impressive. For example, Estelle Adler served as a volunteer for the Red Cross during World War II, and Mary Regan Quessenberry, who earned a degree in fine art from Harvard University, served in the same war in England as part of an intelligence unit. Ubaldo “Ubi” Di Benedetto was born in Italy and volunteered to serve in the Korean War in order to ultimately remain in the United States. Roger Pompeo is a medical doctor who served in Vietnam as part of the Military Provincial Hospital Assistance Program, which, in part, attempted to win over Vietnamese civilians by providing them with medical care; his perspective on the war is one that’s rarely represented in popular accounts. Maura McGowan Yanosick was never a soldier or volunteer in a war, but she did start a Massachusetts chapter of the Blue Star Mothers, a support group for mothers with children who have served or are serving as soldiers. This work, fashioned over 20 years, is a marvelous testament to the diversity of those who have participated in American conflicts and of their many and sundry expressions of patriotism. One minor quibble is the absence of any discussion of World War I. Nevertheless, this is a valuable historical record of martial valor that’s well-researched, intelligently organized, and lovingly offered.
An engaging journalistic account of American military and civilian service during wartime.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-55571-814-5
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Hellgate Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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