A heroic portrayal of an overlooked, blood-soaked corner of the world.
Photojournalist Voeten examines the curious duality of life in a war zone, where he might narrowly escape death in the morning and be offered a shower and cup of coffee in the afternoon.
The author describes a journey to Sierra Leone in the late 1990s. He’s there to photograph demobilized children who were once soldiers but are now cared for by a Catholic charity trying to remold them into regular boys and girls. Ironically, most of the kids want to be fighters when they grow up. Other ironies abound in a West African country where rebels are terrorizing the people in order to oust a government that terrorizes the people. A common greeting in the street is “How de body?” It’s a local version of “How are you?” but it has acquired a nasty resonance in Sierra Leone, where many people have had one or more limbs chopped off. Despite the horrors of his subject matter, Voeten’s fresh, punchy prose rarely becomes sentimental. He is compassionate toward the people of Sierra Leone and toward his readers, who will be grateful that he provides short chapters with tangents on the bigger picture surrounding the country’s plight. His analysis of the history of amputation during wartime, for example, keeps in touch with the dreadful topic but gives them a break from the grim story at hand. Those interested in journalism will find this memoir exhilarating. From what he packs into his suitcase, to his bout with post-traumatic stress disorder, Voeten always finds a way to come back to his private concerns as a foreign correspondent looking out for a story. When the two story-streams coincide, the effect is powerful. In the thick of the tale, his audience will feel the same tension Voeten experienced when he was hiding away from rebels bent on killing all foreigners in their path.
A heroic portrayal of an overlooked, blood-soaked corner of the world.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28219-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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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