Despite its excess of minutiae, Biank has created a vivid picture of life today as a military spouse that may give any...
A close look at the lives of four Army wives at Fort Bragg that depicts the challenges and stresses of being married to the military.
Biank, a former reporter for the Fayetteville Observer who grew up as an Army brat and is now an Army wife, knows the military life and Fort Bragg well. Her interest in the lives of Army wives was piqued in the summer of 2002 by a series of murders there that she covered for the newspaper. Here, Biank focuses on four women, Andrea Lynne Cory, the wife of a lieutenant colonel, and Delores Kalinofski, Rita Odom and Andrea Floyd, all married to enlisted men. She traces the major and minor events of their lives from Christmas 2000 through the summer of 2002. In that short time, the husband of one is killed, the son of another commits suicide and a third is murdered by her husband. Their personalities and their backgrounds differ greatly, but all are shaped by the expectations and restrictions of the military. It is a world where wives carry the rank of their husbands, where class distinctions determine whom they associate with and where and how they live, and it is a world where poverty is common among the lower ranks. For much of the time that Biank is following these women, Fort Bragg is on high alert, with men awaiting deployment. Stress levels exacerbate marital problems, but for either a man or his wife to seek counseling is seen as a sign of weakness and bad for a man’s record.
Despite its excess of minutiae, Biank has created a vivid picture of life today as a military spouse that may give any prospective bride second thoughts.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-33350-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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