The high-adventure story of the legendary Boehm—founder and guiding spirit of the famed SEALs, a highly decorated veteran of three wars—and his tumultuous 30-year career in the US Navy. Boehm, with journalist and former Green Beret Sasser, reviews his military memories: He entered the Navy as a teenage WW II recruit in the risky Underwater Demolition Unit; in the Battle of Cape Esperance, after his ship was sunk, he had a fight with a man- eating shark during which he lost his wounded buddy and Boehm himself made a narrow escape. Later he infiltrated Castro's Cuba on an intelligence-gathering mission. He blames JFK for losing his nerve in the Bay of Pigs disaster and calling off US air strikes, thereby exposing Cuban insurgents to death and capture. Boehm believes that the perception that America lacked the courage to resist aggression encouraged the Communists, resulting in the Berlin blockade, Communist infiltration of Latin America, and the Vietnam War. Boehm also believes that inter-service rivalry and bureaucratic inertia were the biggest obstacles to creating the new commando force he envisioned. He fought the system as hard as he fought US enemies, incurring five courts-martial (which were eventually canceled). Called into President Kennedy's office to explain his behavior, Boehm persuaded Kennedy to give him authority to create the most elite special force in the world—the SEALs. Fighting in Vietnam, the carefully selected, courageous, dedicated, adventurous SEALs outclassed the Viet Cong in merciless raids and ambushes. Boehm blames the politicians and high brass for losing the war. According to Boehm, his frank honesty and refusal to compromise where lives were at stake held back his career, and he left the Navy still a lieutenant. Strong, exciting reading, laced with military profanity and humor.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-671-53625-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
