It wasn’t all blood and guts—coffee and doughnuts played a part in the story of WWII, as related in these letters and journal entries from an American Red Cross worker based in England during that war. Norwalk joined the Red Cross in May 1944, only a month before the Allied invasion of Normandy (D-Day). The volunteers were issued helmets, uniforms, and instructions on what to do if they were captured by the enemy. Their day-to-day lives involved fighting shortages of personnel and equipment and the British propensity for stopping everything—including troop movements—for tea. But also, says Norwalk, “We were expected to be the friend, the girl next door, the kid sister, the funny aunt” to the US troops en route to France and Germany, even as Nazi bombs destroyed military and civilian targets in England. In less than five months, her Red Cross crew saw two million American soldiers debark from South Hampton, England, to Europe. This book is also a love story—or more precisely, several love stories, as one by one, she and members of her crew fell in love with young servicemen. She chronicles her romance with the blue-eyed major who was such a good dancer; they married and lived happily ever after in Seattle, recently celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. After WWII, the Red Cross volunteers with their ubiquitous coffee and doughnuts were often parodied. This story recalls that their cheerful faces, willingness to sing, dance, listen, write letters, and lend a hand with personal problems was invaluable in what was then called the “war effort.” No Saving Private Ryan drama and mayhem here, but a low-key story of courage and dedication to duty whose reward was this: “We were vitally alive, living at full speed, working together for a cause we believed in.” (28 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 12, 1999
ISBN: 0-471-32049-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
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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