Novelist and short-story writer Barnes (English/College of Southern Nevada; Minimal Damage: Stories of Veterans, 2007, etc.) offers a moving memoir of his time at war in Vietnam.
As a young man in 1963, the author was adrift, doing OK in college but without real purpose, emerging from a troubled childhood that left him confused and insecure. A letter from his Draft Board and subsequent enlistment in the Army quickly changed all that. He became, perhaps much to his own surprise, a member of the elite Green Berets, and soon enough found himself in Vietnam. Stationed at Tra Bong, a remote Army outpost surrounded on three sides by forested mountains, Barnes’ life was at first boring and routine, and he captures expertly the humdrum nature of war: beer and bad coffee, rats and diarrhea, darts and cards, heat and insects, dumb officers and flawed but brave comrades. Then, on a routine patrol gone wrong, four of his own and a large number of Vietnamese and Montagnard tribesmen were killed. As he lifted a buddy’s decomposed body off the ground, both a hatred for the enemy and the stupidity of the war emerged. He began his own patrols and learned he could do what few Americans in his outfit could: aptly climb the treacherous mountains and survive in the unforgiving jungle as well as the natives. He learned to trust the jungle, and despite the heat and leeches and danger that seemed omnipresent, he felt more alive than he had before or since. Nearly 50 years later, Barnes writes that “Vietnam is the only thing in my life that isn’t fiction.” In the grand scheme of things, not much happened at Tra Bong; “the life of a trooper out here meant little, except to those who were out here.” But with sharp and unsentimental prose, Barnes makes it matter a great deal. A war remembrance of beauty and unadorned brutality.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8032-3448-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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