A satisfying morsel for fans of The Four Feathers and Lawrence of Arabia—or perhaps of Rafael Sabatini.
A ripping tale of martial glory, commemorating a little-known fighter in a now-forgotten war.
Amedeo Guillet, now 93, was born into a Turin family whose members considered themselves Savoyards first, Italians second, defenders and protectors of “Europe’s oldest and most tenacious ruling dynasty.” Entering military service as a young man, he shone brightly as a familiar of the soldier king Vittorio Emmanuele III, an equestrian member of Italy’s 1936 Olympic team, and an able leader. A fine soldier, yes—but was he a fascist? British journalist O’Kelly sidesteps such distinctions, suggesting that although Guillet had only the dimmest inkling of what Mussolini intended when he started sending his troops into Libya, and then Ethiopia, he stood ready to serve, convinced that it was his country’s duty to bring law, order, and civilization to the heathens. Guillet distinguished himself as a cavalry commander against the fish-in-a-barrel opposition of Haile Selassie’s troops, served a spell in Spain fighting for Franco, then returned to the desert to take on the British, who proved better armed and tougher than his earlier foes. After leading one of the last great cavalry charges in history against a British tank column, he slipped away to organize a guerrilla band that included his Ethiopian lover. (“They had been friends, enjoying each other as life flashed by,” O’Kelly writes in a bodice-ripping moment. “But an empire had fallen since then, and their relationship had deepened.”) After bothering the British a while longer, he returned to Italy just in time to surrender to the Allies, then spent the postwar years serving as a diplomat until retiring to Ireland, enjoying the company of former enemies. O’Kelly spins out this improbable tale with a good eye for dramatic incidents, in which this account abounds, avoiding the usual blood-and-guts clichés. If only our hero—and so he was—had fought for a better cause.
A satisfying morsel for fans of The Four Feathers and Lawrence of Arabia—or perhaps of Rafael Sabatini.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-00-655247-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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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