A courageous breaking of the code of silence to seek mental health for veterans and the war-scarred.
The story of the friendship between an embedded photographer in Afghanistan and a Marine who was wounded in an ambush explosion in 2010.
In this poignant memoir penned in alternating points of view by two very different participants in America’s war in Afghanistan, the authors achieve a shared sense of emotional and physical trauma. O’Reilly, a photojournalist who has spent more than a decade in the most dangerous hot spots on the planet, from Africa to Helmand Province, and Brennan, a Marine squad leader on deployment in Afghanistan, met during that horrific Taliban attack in 2010. O’Reilly took pictures of a wounded Brennan and put them on a web link, to the alarm of his parents, who did not know what was going on. Ultimately, the two “misfits” would meet again in America over their shared suffering from long-running PTSD. After his many deployments and injuries, Brennan suffered from serious concussions, although he preferred to lie about the symptoms rather than reveal the extent of his injuries; O’Reilly, stationed in war zones in Africa and elsewhere, was in denial about his emotional instability. Both men ultimately sought professional help, though for Brennan, it was particularly arduous and painful; even asking for help as a Marine branded him as a “pussy” and lowered his stature with his squad. Nonetheless, the plethora of suicides among his acquaintances and his own bewilderment propelled him to change his career to being a journalist chronicling veterans’ concerns. O’Reilly, on the other hand, had to fight feelings of being “predatory and repulsive” in shooting and publishing scenes of violence. Ultimately, the authors effectively reveal how they moved beyond the “fog of war” and forged a new life after the trauma.
A courageous breaking of the code of silence to seek mental health for veterans and the war-scarred.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56254-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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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