How one man’s resolve gave courage to others and how he turned his public outing into an important surge of activism.
A memoir from the U.S. Army soldier booed at the Republican presidential primary debate of 2011 for asking about upholding the rights of gay and lesbian soldiers.
Snyder-Hill (formerly Steve Hill) is a gay man who was deployed twice to Iraq: first, as a 20-year-old member of the active Army in 1991, when the U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was in full swing; and 20 years later, as a reservist when DADT was just getting repealed. In his relentlessly forthright memoir, the Ohio native sifts through the long, emotionally arduous journey to that moment in 2011 when he allowed his identity to be used publicly in his question to Rick Santorum, knowing the “fallout” that surely would follow among his Army peers and superiors and even risking his benefits and retirement. Ultimately, however, the author decided that he could not continue to lie about such a significant part of his identity. He writes poignantly of that “darkness” inside him that he did not understand while growing up in his small Ohio town. Not able to connect romantically with girls—though he knew that his parents expected it of him—Snyder-Hill was severely closeted throughout his teens, often undergoing torments of self-loathing without understanding why. At the end of his first deployment in Iraq, nearly hit by friendly fire, he swore to himself that if he lived, he would start living life for himself. At Ohio State University, he gradually came out to friends and family. Redeployment as a reservist meant having to hide again, especially the fact of his love and marriage to partner Josh Snyder. The author effectively underscores the damage and suspicions that DADT caused and reveals the heartening and often surprisingly support he received from all directions.
How one man’s resolve gave courage to others and how he turned his public outing into an important surge of activism.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61234-697-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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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