Veteran readers will be visiting familiar ground, but it’s an irresistible story.
In this surprisingly good knockoff of Stephen Ambrose’s classic Band of Brothers (1992), two members of the legendary E Company give their version of events.
Interviewing Guarnere and Heffron for a magazine article coinciding with the 2001 HBO miniseries, the author realized she had the material for her first book. It reads like oral history, with each man chatting alternately for a few pages, but Post provides the firm editorial hand this approach requires. High-school dropouts from impoverished families in Depression-era Philadelphia, both men quit draft-exempt jobs to enlist in the Army’s elite 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. Guarnere, who signed up in 1942, delivers a lively account of the brutal, almost sadistic training. A quick learner with a talent for leadership, he was promoted to sergeant before the unit sailed to England in May 1944 to parachute into France the night before the Normandy invasion. Heffron joined his unit as it recuperated in England after the June 6 landing. The men quickly became friends, parachuting into Holland in September for an exhausting three months of fighting in the abortive Operation Market Garden. Their subsequent rest was cut short by December’s Battle of the Bulge, and they participated in the legendary relief of Bastogne, where Guarnere was injured and lost a leg. Heffron continued fighting across Germany until the surrender. Each of them delivers a relentlessly gripping account highlighting heroism, sacrifice and terrible suffering without concealing a good deal of bad behavior. (Looting was universal, and paratroopers often killed prisoners.) Both men returned to Philadelphia after the war and revived their friendship, which still endures. A coda recounts the burst of fame they experienced following the 1998 movie Saving Private Ryan (based on a one-paragraph reference in Ambrose’s book) and then the HBO series.
Veteran readers will be visiting familiar ground, but it’s an irresistible story.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-425-21728-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
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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