That a man can spend seven years chained to a wall and less than two years later write such a lucid and compassionate memoir...
Tremendously moving account by the AP's former Chief Middle East Correspondent of his 2,454 days as a hostage of the Islamic terrorist organization Hezbollah.
Anderson's memoir comes fast after fellow hostage Brian Keenan's An Evil Cradlingand complements it superbly. (A third hostage memoir, Terry Waite's Taken on Trust, is due out from Harcourt Brace in October but with no advance galleys.) Anderson shares neither Keenan's word-mastery nor his relentless focus on what goes on inside the hostage's cell, heart, and mind (Anderson's major attempts here at introspection, free-form poems that dot his text, are best overlooked). But the ex-reporter's plain and simple narration still packs a wallop and offers much deeper background on political maneuvers surrounding the hostage drama (including Oliver North and Ronald Reagan's respective roles)—with this background complemented by italicized reminiscences from Anderson's then-fiancee, Madeline Bassil. Anderson is also more frank than Keenan about the fluctuating condition of his fellow hostages (who for a time included Keenan himself), especially about squabbles (with up to five men chained into a tiny room, feuds sometimes lasted for weeks), as well as the madness that afflicted American hostage Frank Reed. Otherwise, the memoir at hand much parallels Keenan's: a litany of abuse, suffering, and despair; a paean to love, hope, and courage—which, in Anderson's case, finds its wrenching apexes on the day when Terry Waite, after four years in solitary, is led into Anderson's group of hostages; and on the day when Anderson, blindfolded, feels "Someone [put] a hand on my shoulder'' and is told, 'I'm a Syrian colonel. You're free.'"
That a man can spend seven years chained to a wall and less than two years later write such a lucid and compassionate memoir of his ordeal is a remarkable testament to humanity—as well as an unimpeachable indictment of the terrorism that chained his body but not his spirit.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 1993
ISBN: 0-517-59301-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
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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