The dull-as-dishwater memoirs of a good soldier who rose through the ranks to become the US Army's top noncommissioned officer. Bainbridge enlisted shortly after graduating from high school in 1943. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was taken prisoner by German troops toward the close of 1944. Released at the end of WW II, he returned to his midwestern roots to resume farming. Recalled to active service for the Korean conflict, Bainbridge never left the States. He did, though, acquire a taste for the military life and decided to stay in. Bainbridge (as much a bureaucrat as a warrior) made steady progress in his chosen profession. Following a Vietnam tour, he was given increasingly responsible assignments at a host of duty stations in the US and overseas. In 1975, the author was named Sergeant Major of the Army, a Pentagon-based post he was the first to hold for four years. Mustered out of his beloved Army after 31 years of active service, the ex-noncom (who will turn 70 this year) spent the next 12 years as secretary to the board of commissioners for the US Soldiers' and Airmen's Home in Washington, D.C. Nominally retired, Bainbridge still travels to reunions and armed-forces conferences. Cursed with total recall, he burdens his narrative with inane particulars and minutiae (e.g., detailed rundowns on the quarters he occupied at bases throughout the world, guest lists for long-gone receptions, the routes taken on inspection tours or to reach new duty stations) and heavy-handed tributes to erstwhile COs and colleagues. Save for recurrent assurances about taking good care of the rank and file, he (and Cragg, coauthor of Inside the VC and the NVA, 1992) seldom assess anything remotely resembling a big picture. Autobiographical trivia with all the dramatic appeal of a DoD travel order. (8 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-449-90892-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
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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