Hawks will not admire the sometimes self-pitying tone of Todd’s narrative nor the choice that underlies his memoir, but...
A deserter’s rueful memoir of hard roads traveled.
Born and raised in rural Nebraska, Todd was no ordinary war resister; in the mid-1960s he had volunteered for officer training in the Marines, fully expecting to see combat, but had washed out owing to a pair of bad knees. Having done what he thought was his duty, he took a job as a crime reporter for the Miami Herald, found a beautiful girlfriend, and set about making his mark on journalism. Life had other plans, however, and Todd was drafted into the army and sent to a processing post near Seattle. At the urging of a boyhood friend who returned from Vietnam shattered by the experience of war, he skipped across the border to Canada, where he was greeted with both anti-Yankee hostility and open arms. Broke, he spent time on Vancouver’s Skid Row, where he fell in with fellow deserters who sat out the war under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Most of them returned (voluntarily or otherwise) to the US to face punishment, but Todd renounced his citizenship and found himself on a very short list—numbering only 13 individuals—of deserters reckoned to be men without a country. Granted landed immigrant status by a sympathetic bureaucrat, Todd eventually found work as a reporter in Vancouver. He discovered only later that he had been slated to go not to Vietnam but to Germany (where, a fellow soldier wrote to him, “You’d be sitting on your ass . . . writing press releases for Colonel Jerkoff”). In retrospect, he concludes, he would not have fled the military and his country, although he now ranks as one of Canada’s leading journalists and has made an apparently good life for himself across the line.
Hawks will not admire the sometimes self-pitying tone of Todd’s narrative nor the choice that underlies his memoir, but readers with an interest in the Vietnam era will find a fresh voice in his story.Pub Date: April 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-09155-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
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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