Barker’s story shines an important light on the subject of sexual harassment in the workplace while exposing the shoddy...
In 2004, seeking greater financial security for her family, military wife and mother Barker secured a one-year assignment working for Halliburton/KBR in Iraq. Her memoir chronicles her sexual abuse, the military contractor’s attempted coverup and her prolonged battle for justice.
The author’s orientation in Houston did not go well. She felt the atmosphere was unprofessional, as medical exams were given in a shoddy, substandard building, and prospective employees’ meals were of poor quality. Nonetheless, Barker gave Halliburton the benefit of the doubt and traveled to Iraq. The author felt unprepared for the dangerous environment she encountered. Security was lax, drugs and alcohol, though banned at the camp, were rampant, and a chaotic atmosphere reigned. “I often wondered what the hardworking American people would think if they knew they were paying for such complete incompetence,” she writes. When Barker lodged a complaint against her supervisor, her situation deteriorated quickly. She was held in a shipping container for three days and told she would lose her job if she attempted to leave. After a co-worker raped her, Barker was abandoned in the desert. Upon her return to the States, she sought counseling and hired a team of attorneys. Her struggle for justice became as harrowing as her experiences in Iraq. Barker’s attorneys purposefully misled her, creating stressful and expensive delays. “Like most people,” she writes, “before the experiences described in this book, I wholeheartedly believed in America, and blindly trusted our judicial system. Then, the system egregiously failed my family, my fellow citizens, and me.” The author’s story is interspersed with comments from her husband regarding his wife’s nightmarish situation, the tensions created within the family and his thoughts concerning the legal malfeasance the couple encountered.
Barker’s story shines an important light on the subject of sexual harassment in the workplace while exposing the shoddy ethical standards and procedures of Halliburton/KBR.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60980-547-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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
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
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