Long on heroism, short on analysis and critical acumen.
Veteran journalist Eubanks (To Win and Die in Dixie: The Birth of the Modern Golf Swing and the Mysterious Death of Its Creator, 2010, etc.) follows the careers of two young men: one a cadet at West Point, the other a midshipman at the Naval Academy, from 9/11 to the present.
This paean to patriotism and a fiercely focused definition of manhood and patriotism has all the subtlety of a Fourth of July parade or a halftime show on Veterans Day. The author gives us the backgrounds of his two principals (Chad at West Point, Brian at Annapolis), beginning with a moment in the 2001 Army-Navy game (played only months after 9/11), when linebacker Brian tackled quarterback Chad—their first meeting. Then Eubanks alternates the stories of the two, celebrating along the way the traditional virtues of manliness and patriotism that these two young men embody. To the author’s credit, we do get glimpses of the men’s warts. Brian survived a court martial for sexual assault against a female officer; Chad acted like a pig on spring break in Florida (though the author can’t quite bring himself to characterize it as such). Both eventually end up in Iraq; the author does not question America’s involvement but does celebrate the heroism of his principals, both of whom won—deservedly—battlefield honors. Eubanks also describes the love lives of each man, both of whom eventually left the military. Chad tried a few things before becoming an FBI agent, a position he eventually left for the private security sector; Brian became an accomplished cage fighter then segued into running his own fight-training enterprise. Along the way, the author revisits subsequent Army-Navy games and delivers some play-by-play—of action on the gridiron and on the streets of Fallujah.
Long on heroism, short on analysis and critical acumen.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-220280-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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