Effectively employing a subdued tone, Morgan paints a grim picture of hopelessness leading to desperate militancy, reminding...
An unforgettable cautionary narrative of the author’s days as a French combatant and military journalist during the war for Algerian independence.
Biographer and historian Morgan (A Covert Life, 1999, etc.) spent most of his youth in America, but he was also a French citizen, subject to conscription in that nation’s military. One day he was a cub reporter for a newspaper in Worcester, Mass., the next found him a soldier headed to Algeria. It was 1956, not a happy time to be steaming into the Bay of Algiers. Urban terrorism saw its first systematic use there in the campaign of bombings and assassinations by Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN); the French adopted an open display of barbarity in response. Morgan doesn’t pretend that he behaved differently at first: He admits to having beaten a suspected insurgent to death during interrogation. Retelling that dreadful story in a hollow, detached voice, all he can say is that it disfigured him for life. Fortunately, he soon moved to work as a writer for a government newspaper; at this propaganda sheet churning out “perception management,” he could study the Algerian situation without having to participate in human destruction. Morgan knows how to drive a narrative forward, but the story comes wrapped in dispassion, as if the whole situation is too grotesque for him to hold it close. Yet there is incredible firsthand material: the French paratroopers’ methods of torture, the specifics of FLN bombings and the step-by-step dismemberment of the FLN in Algiers. For those whose images of the war and its combatants were shaped by Gillo Pontecorvo’s pro-FLN The Battle of Algiers, the book’s most startling element may be the wrecking job done on the image of Yacef Saadi, the organization’s less-than-heroic leader in the city.
Effectively employing a subdued tone, Morgan paints a grim picture of hopelessness leading to desperate militancy, reminding us that electroshocks and guillotines rarely solve anything.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-085224-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Smithsonian/Collins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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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