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
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
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
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