Big-picture politics take second place to the achingly personal in Bissell’s heartfelt book.
A penetrating look back at the Vietnam conflict, with Bissell (Chasing the Sea, 2003, etc.) alternately guiding and following his veteran father.
It took Bissell a little doing to convince his father to travel with him to Vietnam in 2003. A Marine junior officer who served in-country in 1966, before things turned definitively bad, the elder Bissell rides with a few ghosts. His son worries that, like so many veterans, he is haunted by failure. “You sought to counter an insurgency and wound up activating a larger insurgency,” the author writes in a passage he would never have addressed directly to Dad, voicing worries that run strong today. Father and son travel to Hue, My Lai, Chu Lai, Saigon and other key locations of the war, making discoveries about the past and about each other. Along the way, Bissell delivers a riveting, you-are-there account of the fall of Saigon—not just the dust-kicking helicopters and hands poking through embassy gates, but the behind-the-scenes activities of the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and Henry Kissinger, worried then, as always, about his image. He had to be reassured that the North Vietnamese would permit the evacuation of American citizens and would not use this embarrassing retreat as a propaganda tool. “In those final words stands the colossal folly of the Vietnam War,” Bissell unsparingly concludes. “The most powerful nation in the world, hotfooting it out of one of the poorest, being assured that no one intends to ‘damage’ its reputation.”
Big-picture politics take second place to the achingly personal in Bissell’s heartfelt book.Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-375-42265-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
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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