A sweet, nostalgic remembrance of a woman’s military adventure.
A debut memoir recounts nine weeks spent in basic training in the Air Force, told through correspondence.
Spooner was born in 1936 in Milford, Connecticut, a small town that couldn’t contain her youthful wanderlust. The author was eager to travel the world, but her family’s modest financial resources made college seem unrealistic. Then serendipity struck: at a gathering of her church youth group, a representative of the Women in the Air Force spoke in the hopes of finding new recruits. Spooner’s interest was piqued, and once she turned 18, in 1954, she signed up. She later left by air for New York City—her first time on a plane—with Texas as the ultimate destination. The remembrance is largely an epistolary one, told through letters exchanged by the author and her mother. Each chapter coincides with a week of basic training in 1955, making for nine chapters in all. Others contribute letters, too—one is written by the mother of her best friend on the base to Spooner’s mom—but the running dialogue between mother and daughter is the narrative fulcrum of the recollection. Spooner describes in minute detail her life on the base—the military regulations, her scandalously flirtatious peers husband hunting, and her generally busy and extremely regimented daily routine. The letters vacillate subtly between homesickness and excitement, though the tenor is consistently an endearingly optimistic one. Even mundane chores are drawn in cheerful colors: “Oh, I must tell you! Today we were drilled by another T.I. who was very comical.” Spooner’s experience is a largely happy one, and she proudly reports how often her flight group won the “Honor Plaque” for passing inspections with the least “gigs” or mistakes. As graduation approached, she was assigned to Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., to work as a typist. As Spooner herself observes in the preface, this is an intensely personal book that will largely interest those who know her, though she does provide a microscopic view into a woman’s life in the military in the mid-20th century. Spooner’s writing is unfailingly clear and her lighthearted ebullience is infectious. The book as a whole is a pleasant, brief portal into a teenage innocence now so unfamiliar it seems almost exotic.
A sweet, nostalgic remembrance of a woman’s military adventure.Pub Date: July 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5127-4665-5
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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