The combination of Holiday’s recollections and McPherson’s academic expertise creates a valuable addition to the canon of...
A combination of memoir and ethnography study examining an unusual, inspiring aspect of the World War II Pacific campaign.
Holiday is one of the last living Navajo “code talkers,” a group of Native American Marines recruited to develop an unbreakable code derived from their unique tribal language. As co-author McPherson (History/Utah State Univ., Blanding; Navajo Land, Navajo Culture: The Utah Experience in the Twentieth Century, 2002, etc.) observes, “The Navajo code talker experience was as much mental and spiritual as it was physical [due to]…the emphasis Navajo culture placed on religion.” One strength of their collaboration is a clear portrait of the daily challenges faced by the Code Talkers in both training and battle. Holiday’s engaging musings on his hardscrabble (yet tradition-inflected) childhood and the young Navajo males' surreal entry into war alternate with McPherson’s explications of Native American history, symbolism and ritual. The scholar argues that Holiday’s experiences connected these ancient cultural markers to the Marines’ intense “island hopping” campaign against the Japanese. Holiday seems serene in recalling participation in brutal battles at Saipan and Iwo Jima, though he notes that the Code Talkers were frequently at risk of being mistaken for the Japanese foe. Following the war, he overcame “nightmares of the enemy standing over me smiling” by having an “Enemy Way” ceremony performed for him. Still, the Code Talkers found postwar life challenging, having been sworn to secrecy. Since each chapter contains an overview of relevant Navajo symbolism, followed by part of Holiday’s recollection of his improbable life story and McPherson’s lengthy interpretation of the young soldier’s experiences, the overall narrative feels rather unwieldy. However, many readers will find the fusion of military and cultural histories enjoyable and fascinating.
The combination of Holiday’s recollections and McPherson’s academic expertise creates a valuable addition to the canon of specific WWII narratives.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4389-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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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