Full of rare insights on one of the toughest jobs anyone has to do.
All the critical stuff Hollywood never had time to tell you in special-effects epics like Backdraft.
Unger, a well-off Jewish kid with Ivy League schooling, isn’t exactly sure what a good firefighter is supposed to be when he spots a recruitment ad in a downtown Oakland bus station, and he’s even less sure he has what it takes to make it in gritty, big-city fire department. But he immediately draws the reader into the experience of finding out in a narrative consistently uplifted by candor and sensitivity, as well as the profane humor that firefighters make part of their ritual, often for the grimmest of reasons. Long before he gets to “working” a real fire, the self-doubting author plots to work the situation, intricately calculating how much quiet confidence he can exude without attracting too much attention, thus neatly avoiding confrontation with a motley assemblage of instructors and fellow trainees. Sometimes it works, often it doesn’t, but Unger gradually realizes that placing life-or-death trust in another human being, and accepting it in return, is a bigger deal than knowing exactly where everything goes in the big red fire truck’s myriad tool cabinets. The bottom line, he discovers, is that the only way you learn to fight fire is by fighting one, then another, and another. Stumbling into a burning basement in dense black smoke, for example, Unger loses contact with the hose line he must follow, mistakenly gloves a building pipe instead, and “tours” the entire area blind, on his hands and knees, while all around him others work to successfully extinguish the blaze. “Fire is chaos given form,” he observes. “Any plan you make will be undermined; no strategy you’ve used in the past can be used again.” Often chastened, but impelled by the fierce pride his unit takes in a job well done, he perseveres.
Full of rare insights on one of the toughest jobs anyone has to do.Pub Date: March 8, 2004
ISBN: 1-59420-001-7
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
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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