Warm and engaging: a piquant slice of a colorful life.
Swinging from tales of war zones to reminiscences of the men she met in them, former CNN reporter Darrow takes the reader on a 20-year trip through Russia and assorted hot spots around the globe.
In 1980, five years before perestroika transformed the Evil Empire, Darrow was a visiting university student in Moscow. Russia, she says, acted “like a narcotic.” Participating with the locals in their all-absorbing quest for subsistence, Darrow came under the thrall of life on the edge, fell in love with the Russian soul, and picked up a handsome husband who wanted a green card. Following the tumult, the urge for a normal job led her to Atlanta in 1986 to take a position as a tape logger at the fledgling Cable News Network. At the time, CNN was operating out of a former plantation, and “anyone with the desire to advance could do so with a bit of perseverance and hard work and willingness to work through weekends and holidays.” Darrow had the requisite attributes. Estranged though not divorced from her Russian husband, she stayed in Atlanta just long enough to have an affair with Ted Turner, discreetly discussed here, but was soon back in Russia as a field producer. She covered the civil war in Georgia, dashing through no-man's-land with Christiane Amanpour to enter the besieged Parliament building. After that it was on to the bombing in Chechnya, where “the Chechens were getting most of the arms from the Russian soldiers they were gearing up to fight, trading bottles of vodka or food for their kalashnikovs.” She moved on to the Balkans and then Israel, alternately covering battle scenes and jumping in and out of relationships with a series of unsuitable men (who nonetheless make for interesting reading).
Warm and engaging: a piquant slice of a colorful life.Pub Date: March 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-72134-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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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