A well-told memoir of captivity and recovery.
The story of the first female African-American prisoner of war in U.S. military history.
Johnson was a U.S. Army cook attached to the 507th Maintenance Company, a unit of mechanics and technicians in Iraq. On March 23, 2003, she was in a convoy that was ambushed after taking a wrong turn in the city of An Nasiriyah. During an intense firefight, Johnson received bullet wounds in her ankles that rendered her barely able to walk, and several other soldiers were taken prisoner. One of them, the soon-to-be-famous Jessica Lynch, was taken to a different location and was rescued days later. After 22 days, with their Iraqi captors frequently moving them from place to place, Johnson and her fellow POWs were rescued by U.S. Marines on April 13. Johnson and co-author Doyle ably recount her captivity with deftly chosen details. Most striking is the simple decency shown by many people. Several Iraqis, such as the doctors who treated Johnson’s bullet wounds, are portrayed quite sympathetically. “I will do my best to care for you,” the author quotes one as saying. “We must show the world our humanity.” Indeed, Johnson and her fellow prisoners were mostly treated humanely by their captors, who provided them with food, clothing and medical attention. Still, Johnson brings across the brutal stress of being a POW and how it haunted her long afterward. The last section of the book, after she and her fellow POWs are returned to the United States, is perhaps the most unexpected. Johnson became a minor celebrity after her return, but she found that some in the military resented that she was being hailed as a hero. Some even felt that her unit had ineptly lost their way in An Nasiriyah and had thus deserved to be captured. Johnson debunks such accusations while still relating their sting.
A well-told memoir of captivity and recovery.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6748-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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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