Though the author admits to some dark memories that she chooses not to share—“some memories I’ve definitely tried to...
The inspiring, page-turning story of Col. Luz, a 25-year member of the Army Reserves who in 2007 was awarded a Bronze Star for her service in Iraq.
The author teams with Brotherton (We Who Are Alive and Remain: Untold Stories from the Band of Brothers, 2009, etc.) to create an engrossing account of her adventurous life. In 2006, her unit was called to active duty in a combat zone. Even though she was 56 at the time, she was undaunted by the rigors of basic training. A nurse with dual specialties—public health and psychiatry—she would be caring for the wounded and establishing community health services for soldiers and Iraqi civilians. As a young woman out of college during the Vietnam War, Luz planned to become an Army nurse. However, because her father—George Luz Sr., of Band of Brothers fame—feared for her safety, she joined the Peace Corps instead. Stationed in a small Brazilian town, she enjoyed her work among the poor, until she was brutally raped and beaten. After a painful period of recovery, she finished her tour of duty, earned a graduate nursing degree and returned to Brazil to work for Project HOPE, this time in a large city. Upon arriving in the United States, she became a school nurse and worked in an inner-city school that resembled a combat zone (“changing dressings on gunshot wounds got to be routine after a while”). Because three of her nephews suffered from cystic fibrosis, she took on a second job, in a psychiatric prison hospital, to help pay their medical bills. Luz offers many fascinating stories about her often hair-raising experiences at home and abroad, and her devotion to public service is admirable and impressive.
Though the author admits to some dark memories that she chooses not to share—“some memories I’ve definitely tried to forget…this is not a ‘tell-all’ book by any means, but a slice of my life as it relates to the greater theme of service”—their omission does nothing to detract from the importance of her story.Pub Date: May 4, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60714-631-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Kaplan Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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