by Tenacity ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 6, 2014
Forthright remembrances of a highly capable author’s gritty sojourns in some of the world’s most dangerous places.
The burly memoir of a diabetic Vietnam veteran recalling his later-in-life adventures as a Department of Defense contractor in the war-ravaged but, for contractors, lucrative Middle East.
The author, who uses the pen name Tenacity (T.W.S.C.: A Shrouded Autobiography, 2014), is nothing if not unusual. In 2003 and in his 50s, a time in life when many are contemplating retirement, he signed on with a defense contractor and headed off for Saddam Hussein’s former palace in Baghdad, his assigned digs while he worked setting up phone and computer systems. Nobody was there to meet him at the airport when he arrived. This was no great problem for the swashbuckling author, whose resourcefulness and fatalistic willingness to take risks—themes that recur throughout the book—got him not only to the palace gate, but through six years as a contractor in far-flung outposts where he was regularly three times the age of the soldiers around him. His sometimes-dicey travels to various Iraqi cities and also to Afghanistan, Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman are detailed along with his observant but often less-than-vivid impressions of each post and the people there. Readers learn that his pen name befits his indispensable-man doggedness in repairing and upgrading computers and devices. However, in this essentially ground-level chronicle, those looking for deep insights into Middle Eastern affairs will not find it among the author’s scattered, big-picture opinions. For instance, the author does not or will not satisfy our interest in knowing how much he and other contractors earned for working in these often hazardous places. Yet the book, which is enhanced by black-and-white photos, is brightened by an improbable love story in which the author, who has grown children but makes no mention of a wife, wooed and eventually wedded a Brazilian woman whom he met on eHarmony while in Oman during 2006 and 2007. Pictures of these two in exotic climes light up what are otherwise fairly pedestrian snapshots of places and people. Many include the author, who is less reluctant to show his face than he is to reveal his name.
Forthright remembrances of a highly capable author’s gritty sojourns in some of the world’s most dangerous places.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491746820
Page Count: 224
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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