Karlin works on a small scale, bringing all the senses into play as he describes acts both of turpitude and decency in this...
Personal encounters with Vietnam, past and present, in a web of prickly memory.
When editor and novelist Karlin (The Wished for Country, 2002, etc.) is hired to work on the film Song of the Stork, his 1966–67 tour in Vietnam begins to unreel again in his mind, like a movie: “It had been like that even then, even as it was happening, and those stories seeped back in again.” The writing here is trancelike, still and thoughtful, groping toward memory and meaning. The time span goes from 1966 to 2004, from Karlin’s gunner’s position on a helicopter to his later role as a screenwriter aware of the moral complexities of his current work and of that of the soldiers, Vietnamese and American, back then. The writer is edgy, but he has returned to Vietnam many times before and is mindful that he must be patient if he wants to hear the stories of the Vietnamese he’s working with on the film, a number of whom were on the receiving end of his fire, as he was of theirs. Questions of conduct loom large, both for the truthfulness of the movie and for Karlin’s own curiosity about how college-age students today, like those working on Song, would have behaved under the circumstances then. He remembers the effort it took to “move at all in the eardrum-cracking din of a fire fight, as projectiles he has seen split and mutilate the flesh of his companions scribble the air around him,” or the courage that was needed to resist the horror of My Lai, as one helicopter crew did, to its peril. The disorientation of those times is still there as Karlin brings us back to 2004. The disgust and heartsickness, the lies, unworthiness, frustration, and rage of a war—these are things he’ll never shake.
Karlin works on a small scale, bringing all the senses into play as he describes acts both of turpitude and decency in this memoir of a country’s consciousness.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-931896-16-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Curbstone Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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