A soldier’s spouse reflects on marriage, sacrifice, and patriotic service.
When Cody (Your Soldier Your Army: A Parents’ Guide, 2005) first met her future husband, Dick, she was a high school sophomore enchanted by a dashing West Point cadet. Eventually, that youthful infatuation deepened into something more substantive, and Cody married the man of her dreams. She also embraced a professional soldier, and she quickly discovered the unique sacrifices the role of the Army wife demanded. Even before they wed, Dick was sent on his first assignment to Hawaii and then deployed on a dangerous mission to Guam during the closing days of the Vietnam War. He trained to become a helicopter pilot and was also sent to Saudi Arabia when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Cody learned to manage the stress of the danger and secrecy Dick’s profession entailed and to build a purposeful and busy life that was sometimes necessarily lonesome. She became involved in whatever community she belonged to, worked as a substitute teacher, and eventually earned a pilot’s license of her own. And while she didn’t grow up within a strong religious tradition, she leaned on a newfound faith to cope with the fear of losing her husband to war, an ever present possibility that provoked profound meditations on the meaning of her life. Given Dick’s meteoric rise up the ranks (he eventually became vice chief of staff of the Army) and the extraordinary obligations he had to shoulder, she also learned to cultivate self-sufficiency: “Unlike Dick, who, as he went up in rank and position, had an entourage that grew in relation to the number of stars he acquired, I was always an army of one.” Cody also became readily adaptable, moving 18 times in 33 years. Her two sons followed in their father’s footsteps and joined the military. She then encountered a new source of trepidation: her sons’ deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan during times of war. Written in an unencumbered, conversational style, this book is partly a personal memoir and partly a study of the ways in which civilians make noble sacrifices out of patriotic commitment. Especially given the United States’ many military engagements around the world, this is a timely and thoughtful offering.
An Army wife’s absorbing testament to the power of family and faith to weather difficult times.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63152-127-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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