A charming recollection that provides considerable insight into military culture.
A brief memoir of a successful military career and a spiritual journey.
Debut author Maxwell was encouraged to write this remembrance by his only grandson. The author was born in 1935 in Greenville, Tennessee; his father was a civil engineer for the U.S. Army, which meant a peripatetic existence for the family, including a stretch in the Philippines after World War II. Maxwell attended military school in Boonville, Missouri, and then, in 1953, matriculated to Kemper Junior College. He also joined the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps summer camp at Fort Meade in Maryland, which began a long career. After floundering at Missouri University, he headed to Navy flight school in Florida and would eventually fly for nearly 20 years, logging close to 5,000 hours of flight time, including 250 combat missions in Vietnam. He studied German and became a diplomat—the naval adviser to the U.S. ambassador to Germany; it was a position, he says, that provided him with access to various classified information, including details about the Soviet Union. Upon military retirement in 1982, he worked for Airborne Instrument Lab Systems, which made electronics for military aircraft. The culmination of Maxwell’s life, though, was his relationship with Jesus Christ, which he says began in 1976 when his wife announced by letter that she’d become a born-again Christian—somewhat to his chagrin at the time. But he later ended up volunteering for a prison fellowship ministry, which he characterizes as an intimidating but spiritually rewarding experience. Overall, the author’s life is a remarkable one, brimming with accomplishment and adventure, and so it’s ideally suited to a written recollection. Despite the fullness of his life, Maxwell keeps the memoir notably concise, offering a lean catalog of major events rather than an obsessive record of personal minutiae, as is sometimes seen in other memoirs. That said, this remembrance can sometimes read like a narrative curriculum vitae due to the author’s accumulation of professional and educational credentials. Nevertheless, the prose is lucid throughout, and the story, about one man’s admirable devotion to service to his country and God, is genuinely engaging.
A charming recollection that provides considerable insight into military culture.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4908-5086-3
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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